Mentoring at JOBLINGE is a mutual learning path, you get “intensive insights into another culture and into the background of a personal life path,” says Thomas Priemuth from BMW.
His experiences as a mentor at JOBLINGE in Halle have broadened his perspective, he explains in an interview.
Why are you involved with JOBLINGE?
The framework conditions for young people – social, personal or familial – are often very different.
These factors have a very strong influence on individual development paths.
For young people with a difficult starting point, it is sometimes very difficult to take the usual route into vocational training.
JOBLINGE tries to help precisely these young people with specialist and personality training, but also with a network.
The concept has convinced me!
To what extent are mentors important for young people?
I find the principle of mentors as a supplement to the JOBLINGE colleagues very helpful.
The mentors usually have a lot of professional experience and can therefore help in difficult situations with solutions or examples from their everyday lives.
As a mentor always supports exactly one young person, this also creates a protected 1:1 atmosphere in which difficult topics can often be discussed better than in a larger group.
What distinguishes your mentee Ciwan, how did the training work out for him?
Despite many adverse circumstances, Ciwan has always kept his goal in mind: to complete an apprenticeship and find a job.
It is a much higher hurdle to pass entrance interviews and aptitude tests if you have not learned German as a native language.
I was impressed by how quickly he improved his German – he became more fluent from meeting to meeting and worked hard on himself, preparing intensively for his exams and entrance interviews.
What have you yourself learned from your mentees?
I have experienced the realities of the mentees’ lives and problems that I didn’t know before.
This in turn helps me to get to know other perspectives and circumstances.
This enables me to better understand the circumstances and behavior in these situations.
For some mentees, the personal contact has also given me intensive insights into a different culture and the background to their personal lives.
These are valuable experiences that broaden your own view of your surroundings in everyday life.
What tips do you prefer to give your mentees?
Even if the general conditions are very difficult at the moment, it helps to set yourself a specific but realistic goal: for example, to successfully pass an exam, get an apprenticeship and start a career.
This helps you to stay focused, but above all to keep yourself motivated and not let setbacks get you down.
In addition, I always try to make it clear that everything the JOBLINGE colleagues and mentors do is always aimed at supporting the mentees on their path.
They therefore need have no inhibitions about making intensive use of this, asking questions, seeking contact or addressing problems.
These are doors that you try to open together, and it helps them to walk through them.
The interview with Thomas Priemuth was conducted on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of JOBLINGE gAG Leipzig this year.
