When Mark Kearney thought about meeting the older student teacher he was about to mentor, he felt daunted.
He questioned what he knew.
Did he have anything to share with someone 12 years older than him about teaching in the classroom?
"I was 25 and they were 37. That gap is pretty significant because they've been out in a different workforce, have a family," Mr Kearney tells RN's Life Matters.
"We were coming from really different places."
He was immediately put at ease — the student teacher wanted feedback and he discovered he knew what he was doing.
"It grew my confidence that I did in fact know what I was doing after a number of years teaching," Mr Kearney says.
This style of guidance — known as reverse mentoring, where a younger person shares their experiences with an older worker — is a growing workplace trend.
As workplaces and career paths change, companies are finding younger workers have experiences worth sharing.
"Mentoring today is not one-directional," says Julie Nyanjom, a business lecturer at Edith Cowan University.
"It's a co-learning environment.
"They're able to create a synergy that is quite healthy so that each one of them can be able to gain something from the relationship."
Reverse mentoring, she says, leads to co-learning and improves workplace culture — but for it to work, people must throw out their stereotypes about age.
"You find that when a younger mentor mentors an older mentee then that relationship may be seen as a little bit dysfunctional because it's not natural," Dr Nyanjom says.
But, she says, that perception is far from the truth.
Focusing on 'experience age'
According to Dr Nyanjom, the "dynamics of life" — code for life outside of work — means older workers returning from career breaks or beginning in a new industry need mentoring.
"Sometimes they are changing careers totally. When they come back in it would be nice to have somebody who can show you the ropes, who can tell you how things are today within organisations," the mentoring expert says.
Upon re-entry, Dr Nyanjom says, older workers are finding younger workers have been in positions for "quite a few years, which means that most probably they have more experience in certain areas".
"Anyone who needs a mentor should be able to get one. Which means that we should be focusing more on experience age rather than chronological age," she says.
Creating a co-learning environment
Dr Nyanjom says younger people tend to be enthusiastic about "new ways of looking at organisational life".
And allowing them a chance to step up and mentor an older colleague has far-ranging benefits for businesses, she says.
These include growing a company's pool of mentors, advancing leadership skills and changing workplace culture about age.
Dr Nyanjom says age discrimination in workplaces "is quite subtle" but still exists.
"If you have young people getting into mentoring relationships with older colleagues then you find that maybe those kinds of perceptions that are held ... begin to diminish, which means that we end up with a healthier organisation," she says.
Mr Kearney is no longer a teacher. When he left his role, his mentee took it over.
"I think things finished up really well," he says.
"We still have a friendship and stay in contact. It's lovely from the outside to watch her grow from strength to strength."
