The role of a mentor is to instigate the personal and professional development of his or her mentee, by sharing own knowledge, expertise and experience with them.

Mentorship relation is built on mutual trust, respect and communication, and it implies that the initial relationship is honest, so that ideas could be exchanged and goals established for the purpose of constant improvement of skills and knowledge, as well as personal development necessary for career advancement.

Although having a mentor is one of the most valuable things you can do in your career, being a mentor is also a very useful and nice experience. To gain the most for yourself and your mentee out of the mentorship program, you should bear in mind that mentorship implies so much more than giving advice on career. Mentees needs someone who will believe in them and be ready to invest in their professional success by personal devotion.

For me, being a mentor is a project with tangible results: the success of your mentee. As someone who was lucky to be under mentorship of incredibly intelligent and noble people during my career, I would like to point our three characteristics that the best mentors should have: the skill to listen, understanding expectations – it is of utmost importance that the mentor understands what the mentee hopes to learn from this relation, taking action – listening and sharing knowledge are important aspects of mentorship relation, but what really makes mentors great is their willingness to take real action for their mentees. Good mentors should believe in their mentees enough to be ready to take certain risk for them.

Being led, encouraged and supported by an experienced mentor, as a person of trust, will provide mentee with a wide range of personal and professional endeavours, which will lead to perceiving personal and professional opportunities from a different point of view, which had been, in all likelihood, completely unknown to them before.

In our program, the mentees are intelligent young people, students with great expectations from their prospective professional careers, and Hemofarm is certainly a company which can provide, in Serbia and in this region, professional knowledge above all, as well as the opportunity to see a positive example of corporate culture, as well as the opportunity to go through a basic level of education in the world of business in pharmaceutical industry. In this interaction between different age groups, these young people reveal to us, the mentors, new ideas and ways of thinking, having within them the energy of the new generation which is the future of development of every company.