“Good mentorship is 80% listening, 10% talking, 10% guiding.”
Ryan Prescott
Ryan Prescott has always been a natural teacher. Early in his career, Ryan originally set his sights on becoming a professor after completing his undergraduate program with a PhD candidacy. However, when he met his future wife in college, he made the decision to pivot away from a life in higher education and, instead, began working in special education as a crisis intervention leader for children on the autism spectrum. While this was an extremely fulfilling role for Ryan, he eventually sought to make a change in his career by breaking into the HR world as a director of internship development at Northwestern Mutual. After working on Wall Street for over six years, Ryan moved back to his hometown in Maine where he currently works as the Chief Experience Officer for V2 Strategic Advisors. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys getting in touch with his teaching roots as an ad-hoc mentor, hoping to use LevelNext as a way of expanding his reach and helping as many students and professionals as possible.
We sat down with Ryan to gather his thoughts on the role of mentorship in the modern workplace. Here are some highlights:
Q: What motivates you as a mentor?
“I like helping people who want help finding the little wins. I think a lot of times, people focus on the ‘big goal’, whether it’s their first six-figure career, whether it’s launching their first business. And while it’s important to have a big goal, helping to build a roadmap of what it’s going to take to get there realistically is really rewarding.”
Q: How would you describe your approach to mentorship?
“I think a lot of students and people growing in their career surround themselves with coaches and mentors who are where they want to get to, and that’s great. But sometimes, working with someone who is at the level you want to get to but in an entirely different department or who has a different story can be powerful. Careers are not straight lines and development is not a straight line. I’ve gone up, down, diagonally, and sideways in my career to get to where I am, picking roles that don’t make sense, creating roles for myself that didn’t exist…So I like helping people understand that it’s not always a traditional path to get from A to B.”
Q: Have you ever been mentored by someone? How did that mentorship impact your career or shape you as a person?
“The reality is, I have no reason to be where I am today other than the mentors that helped me get there. I had an incredible mentor in college who, very similar to where I’m at now, had a path that didn’t make any sense. And whenever I sat down with him, his mentorship was all about making it okay for me to be interested in a lot of different things…When I grew up, you were encouraged to play as many different sports as possible. Now, when you’re 10, you’re encouraged to be a specialist and play one sport year round and it’s the only thing you do. And what I loved about my mentor was that there was never a negative reaction when I would sit down and want to learn something new.”
If you want to get mentored by Ryan, click here to apply and sign up with LevelNext today.