Finding (and Being) a Mentor in Business Analysis: Why Nobody Figures This Out Alone, and What to Do About It
DAY 5 | Knowing When You've Outgrown Informal Mentorship
Informal mentorship - an occasional coffee, a message when something comes up - is genuinely enough for most of a career, for most people, most of the time. At a certain point, it quietly stops being enough, and most people miss it entirely because informal mentorship rarely fails loudly. It just slowly stops moving you forward, and the slowness itself makes it hard to notice.
Three honest signs
None of these signs is dramatic, and none of them means anything has gone wrong. They simply describe a specific, common stage where the format that has worked well starts to run out of what it can offer.
You keep circling the same question in different words. This usually is not a sign you are asking the wrong questions. It is a sign nobody is tracking your progress between conversations closely enough to notice the pattern and interrupt it.
The advice you get has started to feel generic. An informal mentor, seeing you for an hour every few months, only ever sees a thin slice of your actual situation. Their advice is necessarily built from that thin slice, and eventually it starts to feel like it could apply to almost anyone, because in a real sense, it could.
You have outgrown the specific experience of the person you have been leaning on. A mentor two years ahead of you is enormously useful for the first two years of the gap. Once you close that gap, the same relationship, however good it has been, has less new ground left to cover.
It is worth being clear that none of this reflects badly on an informal mentor, or on you for having relied on informal mentorship this long. An informal mentor giving an hour every few months, unpaid, alongside their own full working life, was never signed up to track your progress over months, hold you accountable to specific commitments, or build a structured plan around your particular gaps. Expecting that from an informal relationship is expecting a format to do a job it was never built for.
What the more structured version actually adds
This is the honest difference, and it explains why coaching exists as something distinct from mentorship rather than a smaller or lesser version of it. Structured coaching adds consistency: someone who sees your actual situation regularly enough to track a pattern rather than a snapshot. It adds accountability: someone checking whether what was agreed last time actually happened. And it adds a plan built around your specific gaps rather than general advice calibrated for whoever happens to be asking.
None of that makes informal mentorship less valuable for what it does well. It simply means the two are different tools, built for different stages and different needs, the same way a single stakeholder conversation and a structured project plan both matter without being substitutes for each other.
Where this leaves you
This week covered why nobody figures a career like this out entirely alone, what a mentor genuinely does and does not do, a practical framework for finding and approaching one, and what makes a mentee worth a mentor's continued time. None of it argued that informal mentorship is insufficient by default. It argued that there is a real, recognisable point where it starts to run out of what it can offer, and that point is worth noticing honestly rather than pushing past for another year out of habit.
If any of the three signs above sounded uncomfortably close to where you actually are right now, that discomfort is worth sitting with rather than dismissing. For analysts at that specific point, this is exactly the gap structured coaching through Flotog BA Insights is built to close, with the consistency and accountability an informal conversation every few months was never designed to provide. If that describes you, it is worth a conversation, not a decision made alone.
A closing thought on the whole week
None of this week argued that you need anyone's help to become good at this work. The actual craft is still built the way the Breaking Into Business Analysis series described, through doing the work, badly at first, then less badly, over real time. What this week argued is narrower and, I think, more useful: that the speed and direction of that process changes enormously depending on whether you are figuring out the unwritten rules entirely alone or with someone a few steps ahead willing to shorten the distance. I had that once, and I would not be writing any of this without it. It is worth going and finding your own version of it, in whatever form actually fits where you are.
Monday started with an admission that felt small at the time and turned out to matter more than almost anything else in my career: I asked for help before I felt ready to, and someone said yes. Whatever stage you are at right now, that same small, uncomfortable step is still available to you, and it is very likely the fastest path through whatever you are currently stuck on.
Go out and be successful.
Oluwatosin Ogunkoya · Flotog BA Insights
1:1 mentoring and coaching for BAs at every career stage · http://www.flotogbainsights.com/
NEXT WEEK
Business Process Modelling: Making BPMN Actually Useful - Turning a notation most analysts learned once and rarely use well into a genuinely useful daily tool.
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