Career

The Mentorship Myth: What Accelerates Careers

“Find a good mentor” is incomplete advice. What helps a career grow is self-direction and a network of peers.

By Joary Khairudin-Casey, Founder · Principal Consultant · September 14, 2026 · Quick Read · 4 min

Many people have told me, “You just need to find a good mentor.” It came up during my first assignment as a Contracting Officer’s Representative (COR), when I was deciding whether to move into consulting, and last month when a student in one of my classes asked me how to move from General Schedule (GS) grade 9 to a leadership role. Every time, I want to push back. Mentorship helps. Advice that treats it as the main way to advance a career is incomplete.

Self-Direction

The professionals I have watched grow the fastest identified what they needed to learn, found the resources, and did the work before anyone asked them to. When I was building my capture management methodology, I had no written method to follow. I went through a lot of trial and error, read the source material, talked to practitioners who had won, and reverse-engineered what worked.

Mentors can suggest what to learn. It helps to set your development plan first and then look for people who can challenge your thinking. When you bring a mentor a specific question from what you have already looked into, the conversation is more productive than one that starts with “What should I be doing?”

Peer Networks

In my experience, peers often teach you more than someone two levels above you. Senior leaders give you perspective and strategic context. Peers give you real-time problem solving, honest feedback, and mutual accountability.

When I moved from federal service into independent consulting, the people who helped me the most were not senior executives. They were other consultants facing the same uncertainty. They shared what worked, what failed, and what clients cared about. I could return to that group of peers every week.

If you are putting all your networking time into finding one mentor, it may help to spend some of it building a group of three to five peers who are working through similar challenges.

Career Accelerators

I have watched enough career trajectories (my students, my colleagues, my own) to identify what helps a career grow. It is the combination of self-direction, a peer network that keeps you accountable and challenges your assumptions, and mentorship.

The next time someone tells you that you need a mentor, it can help to ask yourself what you are doing to grow right now.