International Day of Education
Evonik celebrates ‚2020 International day of Education’. Education and learning is the key driver for advancing a Diversity breakthrough. Reverse mentoring enables learning and facilitates cross generational and cross cultural relationships.
The United Nations has proclaimed the 24th of January as International Day of Education to honour the role of education to human well being and sustainable development. As the world is rapidly globalising, diversity is becoming increasingly present across all aspects of life. Education and learning brings the ability to recognize, appreciate and live without bias, in a society full of diversity. Evonik enables education and continuous learning of its employees through Reverse Mentoring.
Reverse Mentoring is an inverted type of mentoring relationship where junior or less experienced employees’ mentor the more experienced employees and/or managers to help them acquire new learning or perspective.
Read more about what our mentors and mentees have to say:
When Thabata Marengo introduced me the Reverse Mentoring program, my first thought was: ‘How can I help someone much more experienced than I?’ but I immediately felt excited about the idea of figuring it out. Nowadays, after three months working along with my mentee Thalita, I can say that I feel grateful and happy of being part of such a powerful and enriching experience.
In our first session, Thalita proposed me to work around the possibilities that LinkedIn offers to attract customers. That’s when I realized that, even being part of HR, I didn’t know too much about such a powerful tool for professionals from my area. From that day on, we’ve been through a huge learning path. The motivation of being her mentor and the desire of bringing her always valuable material have been my big engine.
I would like to thank Evonik for the opportunity of being part of this great initiative and I also want to thank Thalita for teaching me from her role to explore my own limits to achieve a mutual learning.
I encourage everyone to be part of this Program to discover that we can always learn something new, and that the source of learning can be closer than what we think, inside Evonik, from any part of the world no matter the borders nor the age. Let’s continue learning!
Looking back to our 3 months experience we both liked the experience putting ourselves in new roles and extending our network across generations and cultures.
Right from the beginning we built up a trustful and open relationship and developed it over time. At times, we both caught ourselves falling back into our "traditional" mentoring roles.
But after our third meeting, we can say that we adopted our new roles and live them in every meeting. The most recent session was the most fruitful one.
And we will continue and keep on learning from each other - for sure.
Overcoming our challenge of distance, I was unsure of how we were going to be able to connect and what the outcome was going to be initially.
Through a little creativity in scheduling and support of technology, we were able to connect on a regular basis to discuss the topic of effectively using ‘LinkedIn Tools’. Now, my Mentor Camila is an expert in this area and she has supported me a lot, thanks so much Cami!
Unexpectedly, after we started working towards that goal our relationship developed into becoming learning advocates for each other! We had the chance to bond professionally and keep up with the current news in each other's respective business.
I thank you and congratulate Evonik Reverse Mentoring Program in collaborating in a way that we both learned and grew from this experience in positive and proactive ways.
I definitely feel as if we came out of this experience with more resources for business and professional growth, it has been great to have such a rich experience within the Evonik group. Let’s continue learning!
I must say that I learnt a lot within our Reverse Mentoring Sessions. It is very interesting that Sharon and I came from different countries. So, Sharon worked in different places of the world, for example China. Which is so great because I love stories about news countries.
One time we talked about life Coaches. She told me that she had such a Coach back in China who helped her to find out what she really wants in her life and set some goals. I thought about working with a life Coach too after finishing my Master Studies.
It was very helpful that Sharon shared her experiences with me.
We also talked a lot about new ways of working which is very interesting because I am studying economic psychology. Therefore I read a lot about new ways of working, how to motivate employees and human behaviour in general.
Often we talk about ways how to create more exciting meetings, like for example some new methods of brainstorming. So I gave her some theoretical input from my studies and Sharon shared her experience with other methods from her job.
This way we discussed a lot about those things and shared or create some new ideas for meetings, for example the kick off meeting with her new Onboarding Team.
I am very happy that she’s my Reverse Mentoring Partner.
Btw Sharon helped me a lot to increase my English. Before our Reverse mentoring I was always so nervous when I had to talk in English. Today I am used to it (more or less)