Yury SVIRIDOV: instil love for the chosen profession

Even those who today lead young employees into masters, once relied on the strong hand of a mentor, his knowledge and experience. Among such students was Yuri Mikhailovich Sviridov, a mechanic for operation and repair of gas equipment of 6th grade of turbine shop. His work experience at Almaty CHPP-3 amounts to thirty years, of which he has been a mentor for more than 16 years.

When he first came to work at Alma-Ata power complex in 1994, his first mentor was A.V. Sidelnikov.

“He taught me not only how to work competently and safely, but also how to value my labor and respect the team,” says Yuri Mikhailovich. – From him I learnt the attitude to mentoring. He laid the understanding that this is not a one-day job. That it is a serious training process in production mode, including the transfer of experience, accumulated knowledge, and peculiarities of work. Today, I consider the most important thing in the work of a mentor to be the task of instilling a love for the chosen profession in a short period of time. And the most difficult thing in mentoring is to try to convince a young employee of the right choice of profession, to strengthen his decision.

Obviously, if it is a conscious choice of a young person and not a mistake or accident, but it is a good mentor who can discern in a student a predisposition to such work, his abilities or, on the contrary, the wrong choice. It is also important in such a situation – to prompt a novice worker to try himself in another field. Yuri Mikhailovich himself has trained about a dozen specialists over the years.

“I especially remember the worker Yermek Bayakhmet, who was afraid of everything when he came to us, but now he can teach anyone he wants,” recalls the mentor. “It used to happen that you explain to a newcomer all day how this or that machine works, and the next day he asks: ‘What is this and how does it work’.

But if a person has neither interest in his profession nor desire to learn, the best decision for everyone is to give him the opportunity to find an alternative in order not to break a person’s professional destiny and to give the opportunity to study to those for whom it is really important and necessary. Yuri Sviridov believes that the value of mentoring is also in introducing a person into the production process in such a way that he feels his need, importance and responsibility for the work he is doing.

“The core of a mentor is his personal experience, knowledge, courtesy and patience,” Yuri Sviridov formulates his principles. – We must instill in our students respect for the team, for their work, teach them to separate home and production. I remember well how my first mentor, a foreman at the technical school, said: “The company’s passageway is a boundary: before the passageway you are a family man, and after it you are a member of the collective, and it is undesirable to confuse the two. But one thing does not interfere with another, it rather complements. And the older you get, the better you realize that the main thing in life is home, family, children, and grandchildren and…work that brings satisfaction. Therefore, each of us at the workplace is a small but important ‘cog’, ‘detail’ in the overall mechanism of production. And everyone makes his or her contribution to the common cause. It is different for everyone, but the common features are conscientiousness, responsibility for the assigned work or area, regardless of what profession in the power industry a person has chosen, whatever position he or she holds. And mentors play a key role in the formation of such an approach…