LRT English is partnering up with Lithuanian Dream to bring you a weekly English-language podcast. In this installment, we speak with Maksim Solovjov about the mentorship programme LT Big Brother.
The programme matches ‘mentees’ – people at the beginning of their career – and ‘mentors’, who can offer them guidance and advice.
“Both mentors and mentees have to overcome this internal hurdle and place yourself and become ‘available’. And this is how it works and it's quite magical,” says Solovjov.
He got involved with LT Big Brother in 2019 after joining the Lithuanian City of London Club.
“I had quite a large network for my stage of the career, because a year into my previous job at Bloomberg, I got myself into teaching. So every single engineering junior hire that would get into Bloomberg would go through me and have to listen for a couple of days to me talking – and not everyone hated me.”
Initially, the programme worked similarly to matchmaking, with coordinators matching mentees with mentors that they thought would best meet their needs. But as the network expanded, “the matching now is based on this Tinder model where you swipe right on your mentor and the mentor chooses you – and if there's a match, there's a match”, says Solovjov.
While intended as a vehicle to get Lithuanians in London, Brussels or New York to help each other advance their careers, mentorship can be more than that, he adds.
“You have two kinds of mentors. One of them is, like, oh it was so exciting, I got to help people with their relationships and how to be happy in life in general. And others were like, I came here to help you to get a job, I don't care about your boyfriends, I can just talk about the professional stuff.”
Still, he adds, “success is really about feeling self-actualised, it's about feeling that what you do matters, that you are using yourself to do your most, and you're just happy and you've achieved what you set out to achieve”.
Listen to the full episode of Lithuanian Dream Podcast on Soundcloud or on Spotify below.
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