YUSEF’S REVERSE MENTORSHIP JOURNEY
Yusef Issa Basha:
Yusef applied to the Embark project to find a good job by having connections with high-level business leaders. “I believe that having a professional network is the best way to find better job opportunities, and Embark is a good place to find good references.”. “When I received the acceptance email and read the brief about my mentee, I immediately researched her company and position. I admired it when I saw that she had 15 years of experience in leading a high position in a well-known company, and I decided not to miss this great opportunity.”.
Yusef and his mentee set an objective to their reverse mentorship relation and discussed their perspectives on common topics. “Having a continuous relationship after the reverse mentorship was the objective in our journey. To achieve our goal, my mentee and I set two main topics to discuss. I have good knowledge of web applications, and my mentee was interested to know about this. I was able to find her good applications that helped her in organizing her work, time, and daily tasks. From my side, I had many questions about the work environment in the multinational companies in Turkey and how I could find a suitable job there. My mentee gave me important key advice when she told me that I have to find myself and explore what I want, then for sure, I will find my dream job. She didn’t answer all my questions, but she taught me how to find these answers by myself.”
Yusef attended the series of Embark bootcamps for skills development to improve his presentation and leadership skills, and he saw that improving these main skills could help him in marketing himself better during his meetings with his mentee, but he found something he never thought about before:
“I am open to learning, and I attend courses that I am interested in. I am an electrical engineering student, a graphic designer, I love coding, I play guitar, I am a singer, I do voice-overs, and I learned how to be a crypto trader! I was confused and unorganized, I have lots of things I know but the problem here is that I didn’t know what I want and how to plan for my career as well as how to search for the type of job that I would like to get.
I learned from Embark bootcamps how to set my priorities and be more organized. I could find what I really want and I made a plan to build my own designing company.”
Yusef is a very social person. He has many friends at the university, and from the courses he attended, and he always enjoys finding new places and people:
” I feel that I am a member of the Embark family. I met many multi-talented people from different backgrounds, and I learned a lot from their stories and achievements about how to overcome the challenges and difficulties as a young refugee student.”
The power of the impact:
Yusef was excited to know about social entrepreneurship as a new concept, he attended the two days of the social entrepreneurship bootcamp and was motivated to be part of the solution.
“The social entrepreneurship bootcamp was something new for me. The stories that the trainers told us about the social entrepreneurs in the world and their positive impact on finding solutions for social problems and the experiences that the experts provided inspired me. I wasn’t thinking that the social problems could be solved by the individual’s ideas, but now I feel that nothing is impossible when I want to do something I believe in”. I also now know that I can also support these initiatives with my work.