You Don't Need a Mentor. You Need Three!

You Don't Need a Mentor. You Need Three!

By John Crager, CMRP, SHRM-SCP | Next Shift Blog at WorkReady.works Published June 2026 | ~1,600 words | 6 min read

Early in my career, one of my mentors, Norwin Schoener of Air Products, told me something I've never forgotten.

He said the difference between a hydrogen plant and an air separation plant was mostly the temperature range they operated in. At the core, they shared the same fundamentals. Pipes, valves, fittings, and the discipline to execute work right the first time.

That observation didn't just explain two types of industrial plants. It handed me a mental model I've used ever since. A way of stripping any new environment down to its underlying principles and recognizing what transfers and what doesn't. It changed how I approached every career move I've made since.

That's what a real mentor does. Not cheerleading. Not résumé advice. Not a LinkedIn connection who occasionally likes your posts. A real mentor hands you a lens, then trusts you to use it.

The data backs up what most industrial professionals already sense but rarely act on. 83% of workers say workplace mentors matter. Only 52% actually have one. And 34% say the lack of a mentor has actively held back their career (Mentorloop, 2024). In heavy industry, where the knowledge transfer problem is already critical with the Boomer retirement wave hitting hard, that gap has real operational and personal consequences.

This post is about closing it.

What Mentorship in Industrial Careers Actually Looks Like

Let's be direct about what mentorship isn't, because the word carries enough cultural baggage to make experienced industrial professionals dismiss it before it has a chance to help.

Mentorship is not a formal HR program where you get matched with somebody in a different department to meet monthly over coffee. Not a coaching engagement you pay for by the hour. Not a relationship where somebody tells you what you want to hear until you feel good enough to keep grinding.

Real mentorship in the industrial world looks like Norwin's comment about hydrogen and air separation plants. Looks like a fifteen-minute conversation in a control room that changes how you see your whole career. Looks like a senior planner who tells you, without softening it, exactly why your work packages keep coming back for revision. Looks like a turnaround manager who invites you to the post-execution debrief and lets you sit in the room where the real assessment happens.

Specific. Honest. Experienced. Often uncomfortable. And available to you, if you know where to look and how to ask.

Why Career Transitions Specifically Demand a Mentor

The case for mentorship is strong at every career stage. It gets particularly critical during transitions, when you're moving from a known context into an unknown one and the cost of wrong assumptions runs highest.

Take the Hershey example. Right now, there's a Maintenance Planner opening at Hershey. Yes, the chocolate company. And the instinct of most heavy industrial planners seeing that posting is immediate. That's not my world. The equipment is different. The product is different. The culture is probably softer. There's no food manufacturing on my resume.

Norwin's mental model says: look again. Strip it down to the fundamentals. Job scoping and work package quality. Planning for execution efficiency. The impact of planning on reliability and uptime. Whether it's chocolate, chemicals, or hydrocarbons, the fundamentals of planning excellence don't change (Qooper, 2024).

A mentor who has made a similar cross-industry move, or who has the conceptual breadth to see the underlying pattern, can hand you that lens before you walk away from an opportunity that was actually perfect for your skills. Without that voice in your ear, you self-select out of roles your competencies would have won outright.

That's the specific, measurable value of mentorship during a transition. It expands the aperture of what you can see as possible.

The Three Types of Mentor You Actually Need

Not all mentorship relationships serve the same function. The professionals who navigate career transitions best don't rely on a single mentor. They build what amounts to a personal advisory bench (WomenTech Network, 2024).

The Domain Expert. Somebody with deep knowledge of the function you're moving into or the industry you're entering. Their value lives in the specifics. The unwritten rules. The terminology that signals you actually know the work. The red flags in job postings that only insiders recognize. For a planner moving into a new sector, that's the person who tells you what the role actually involves versus what the HR-written posting says it involves.

The Career Navigator. Somebody who has made a similar arc in their own career. From execution to planning. From turnaround to steady-state. From technical specialist to leadership. From one industry to another. Their value isn't in telling you what to do. It's in showing you the transition is genuinely possible and handing you a credible map of the territory.

The Honest Mirror. Rarest of the three. Most valuable, too. Somebody who'll tell you what you need to hear instead of what you want to hear. Reads your resume and tells you it undersells your experience. Sits with you through a mock interview and calls out the moment you started rambling. Asks the question nobody else is willing to ask. Are you sure this is the right move, or are you running away from something? Mentees who have an honest mirror in their corner are five times more likely to get promoted than those without one (Emerge Mentors, 2024).

Where to Find a Mentor Who Actually Works

The most common reason industrial professionals don't have mentors isn't lack of interest. It's that they don't know how to find one without the whole thing feeling awkward, transactional, or like asking for a favor they can't repay.

Here's where the real ones live.

Your professional associations. SMRP chapters, iAPSCC® programs, and TINC conference networks exist specifically to put experienced practitioners in the same room. These environments are self-selecting. The people who show up to an SMRP chapter meeting at 7 AM on a Tuesday are exactly the professionals worth building a relationship with. Show up. Be specific about what you're working through. Ask thoughtful questions. The relationships that form in those contexts are often more durable and more useful than anything a formal corporate program produces (ASME, 2024).

The post-debrief conversation. Some of the most valuable mentorship moments in industrial careers happen in informal spaces. After a presentation. At the end of a conference session. During a plant visit. When somebody says something that resonates, tell them so. Be specific. "The way you framed that reliability problem gave me a completely different way of thinking about backlog management. I'd love to continue that conversation sometime." That's not networking. That's the start of a mentorship relationship.

LinkedIn, used surgically. Not a broadcast message to 500 people. A specific, thoughtful outreach to one person whose career arc you've studied and whose work you actually respect. A short note that references something specific they've written or said, explains your situation in one sentence, and asks for 20 minutes of their time. The hit rate on personalized, specific outreach runs meaningfully higher than generic connection requests. And the industrial professional community is smaller and more reciprocal than most people realize.

People you've already worked with. The best mentors are often hiding in plain sight. The senior planner who ran the shutdown you supported three years ago. The turnaround manager who gave you your first real scope of work. The reliability engineer who pushed back on your job plans and made them better. These people already know your work. The relationship doesn't need to be built from scratch. It needs to be named, and made intentional.

How to Be a Mentee Worth Mentoring

Mentors aren't infinitely available. Their time is the scarcest thing they have, and they're making a judgment about whether investing it in you will be worth it. Not just for you. For the profession too, and for the sense of purpose that comes from building somebody else's capacity.

The mentees who get the most from these relationships share a few consistent behaviors, and none of them are mysterious. They come with specific questions, not general uncertainty. They take notes and act on what they're told. They report back with the actual outcome of trying what the mentor suggested, including when it didn't work. They're honest about what isn't fitting, including when the mentor's advice misses their situation. And they eventually give back, paying the relationship forward by mentoring somebody else, making introductions, or contributing to the communities where the mentor invests their time (Burnett Specialists, 2024).

The reciprocity doesn't have to be immediate. Norwin didn't need anything from me when he explained hydrogen and air separation plants. But every time I take that mental model into a new environment, every time I help somebody else see the fundamentals underneath an unfamiliar context, that relationship keeps producing value.

That's the long game of mentorship. And in industrial careers, where the knowledge being transferred represents decades of irreplaceable operational experience, it may be the highest-return investment you make in your professional life.

The Bottom Line

56% of American workers say they don't have a mentor (MentorcliQ, 2024). In heavy industry, where the Boomer exit is accelerating and the knowledge transfer window is closing fast, that number is both a professional crisis and a personal opportunity.

The professionals who navigate the transitions ahead, from turnaround to steady-state, from technical to leadership, from one industry to another, won't do it alone. They'll do it with a Norwin in their corner. Somebody who has seen enough of the landscape to hand them the lens that changes everything.

Go find yours. Be specific about what you need. Show up ready to work.

And when the time comes, be somebody else's Norwin.

John Crager, CMRP, SHRM-SCP, is a heavy industry operations and planning professional with decades of experience in refinery and petrochemical environments. He is the author of Blue Collar Resume Mastery, available on Amazon, and writes about career navigation, credentials, and the future of the industrial workforce.

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