A good mentor can change someone’s life forever.

I grew up attending public school in the suburbs of Paris, and my grades weren’t very good until I got to high school. A teacher there sat me down and told me that I had potential, and that I should be more ambitious with my goals. In that short conversation, he triggered something in me that inspired me to aim higher and work harder. He gave me specific steps I needed to take to achieve more, and he showed me how the things I was learning then could pay off in the future.

That ten-minute conversation set me on the path to where I am now.

I got lucky. That teacher noticed something in me and helped me go further in life. But there aren’t nearly enough mentors out there to reach the people who need them and unlock their potential.

People around the world want to learn new skills and master new technologies. But they need guidance to discover in what areas they have the most talent, how to set goals, and what they should do to reach them. Artificial intelligence can bridge the gap and provide guidance to those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to find a human mentor.

What makes a good mentor?

Anyone can be a mentor: a parent, a teacher, a coach, a coworker, a friend. The relationship is less important than the process and the result.

A good mentor will do four things:

• Assess: No two people have the exact same experiences and skill levels. A good mentor will be able to identify the talent and potential in a specific person, as well as the areas where they might need more help or coaching to go further. A good football coach will be able to recognize the raw talent in a player while also seeing the holes in their game — a fast, agile forward might need to spend more time on their footwork to become a truly strong player.
• Set goals: An experienced mentor can help someone set ambitious but realistic goals. My teacher in high school saw that I had untapped potential in mathematics — it was a reasonable goal for him to push me to pursue a career in technology. 
• Show the path: You can desperately want to reach a specific goal, but you won’t achieve it if you don’t know the steps it takes to get there. Good mentors know the path to success — they’ve either gone down the path themselves or seen others succeed. They should be able to prescribe a general set of steps to get from point A to point B.
• Inspire: My mentor in high school inspired me — he challenged me to work harder. The best mentors are those who can light a fire in someone and push them to achieve more than they thought possible.

The value of AI mentorship

When we think of mentorship, we often think of specific people and the human, emotional relationships between a mentor and their student.

But surprisingly, AI is better than human mentors at doing most of the things I listed above.

Software has a much better memory than a human mentor, and it can deliver much more precise assessments of someone’s ability levels. My high school teacher saw that I had talent in mathematics; an AI assessment could have told me precisely what my abilities were not just in mathematics, but in specific skills like algebra, calculus, geometry, and statistics. 

When a human mentor tells someone how they can reach their goals, they’re basing that advice off of their own lived experiences. They will inevitably be biased towards what worked for them or what resources they used. Artificial intelligence will make recommendations on what to study based on a massive catalog of knowledge and resources — exponentially more information than any single human could know about. And those recommendations aren’t frozen in time; AI constantly adjusts its recommendations to incorporate new information.

The one area where it may feel like humans have an advantage over AI is inspiration: can software really light a fire in someone and drive them to work harder?

Yet with Workera, we see that AI can be just as effective in motivating learners. I have heard from users of our product based in remote locations — eager students who would otherwise never have access to experts and mentors. Those users have told me how Workera’s benchmarks motivated them by showing what it truly means to be best in class. They can see what it means to be Accomplished in machine learning in Silicon Valley, which gives them a concrete goal to work towards. 

We believe in the importance of mentorship at Workera.  AI-backed assessments democratize access to mentorship, allowing any individual with ambition and willingness to learn to reach their full potential.