World FM Day: mentoring, making connections that matter

News

A key date in the workplace and facilities management (WFM) calendar, this year’s World FM Day takes the theme ‘Inspire, Integrate, Innovate: Ignite Your Career in FM.’ For junior professionals, it’s an opportunity to discover the opportunities to progress, innovative skills and different perspectives that make WFM a career of choice for diverse talent pools. For senior professionals, mentorship can be a vital way to enhance the organisations, the sector and junior colleagues, enabling all to reach their full potential.

This World FM Day, inspire your colleagues by sharing a range of experiences, whether successes or learnings, highlighting the reality of a career in the sector. Describe how both individual employees and the community can transform organisations for the better, working to benefit people, planet and profit. Inform colleagues of conferences, training opportunities and qualifications to get ahead professionally and enhance organisations.

Through mentoring, professionals can integrate different talent pools, ranging from school leavers to graduates, veterans to people returning to work (plus many others), strengthening WFM as a community. To create a conducive mentor-mentee relationship, establish appropriate parameters, share regular feedback, put a suitable amount of time aside and remain open-minded to contrasting opinions and perspectives.

Determine your mentees’ needs and aspirations to ensure they can make the most of the experience as they work to move their career forward. Connect different team members to encourage networking and developing synergies, whether in the organisation or community.

With mentoring, mentors can drive innovation by encouraging professionals earlier in their career, relating experiences where creative, unconventional thinking succeeded, plus, celebrating achievement which might otherwise go unrecognised. By following the ideas laid down by World FM Day, mentors and mentees can ignite talent at any career stage, across organisations and the community, ultimately working to close the skills gap and prepare WFM for tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.

What next?

Wherever you are in your WFM career, you can get involved in IWFM Mentoring. To find out more, click here. Not a member or unsure if you hold the right type of membership? Contact our Member and Customer Engagement team on +44 (0) 1279 712 650 or via email at: [email protected].