Being reachable isn’t the same as being useful. A junior colleague who can find you when they’re stuck has access — whether they’re actually learning anything from you depends on what happens after they ask the question.
Show the reasoning, not just the conclusion
When someone asks you whether a change needs a new 510(k) or whether a deviation is reportable, the fast, kind thing to do is just tell them. It’s also the thing that keeps them dependent on you a year from now. The slower version — walking through which factors you weighed, which one actually decided it, and which ones you considered and set aside — costs you two extra minutes and teaches a transferable skill instead of a single answer. The test of whether you did this well isn’t whether they got the right answer today; it’s whether a similar question six months from now doesn’t need you at all. That shift, from being the answer to being the model for finding the answer, is most of what separates a mentor from a helpful coworker.
Reviewing for judgment, not just correctness
Marking up a draft for missing citations, weak phrasing, or a wrong regulatory reference is a useful pass, and it’s also the shallow one. The deeper review asks why the person made the choices they made — why they scoped the argument the way they did, why they picked that predicate or that risk category, what they considered and rejected before landing where they landed. Asking “why did you frame it this way” instead of just fixing the framing tells you something a red-pen edit never will: whether they don’t know the right answer yet, or whether they got the right answer without understanding why it’s right, which is its own kind of gap. It also does more for someone building toward reviewing a colleague’s draft themselves than any number of corrected drafts handed back in red ink.
Where this goes wrong
Answering the question they asked instead of the one they should have
Sometimes the real gap is upstream of what they asked. Answering literally can leave the actual confusion untouched.
Staying purely reactive
Waiting to be asked feels respectful of their time, but a junior colleague often doesn’t yet know what they don’t know enough to ask about it.
Never admitting uncertainty
Always sounding sure teaches the wrong lesson about what regulatory judgment is supposed to feel like, and makes it harder for them to admit their own doubt later.
None of this requires a title or a formal program — it’s a different thing from the structured process in onboarding a new hire, which runs on decision logs and calibration in someone’s first weeks. Mentoring is the informal, ongoing version that continues long after onboarding ends, and it runs on the same discipline this essay's other half runs on: if you were the one looking for a mentor a few years ago, this is what being useful to that search actually looks like from the other side.
Sources & further reading
- Regulatory Academy — Finding a Mentor in Regulatory Affairs regulatoryacademy.com
- Regulatory Academy — How to Onboard a New Regulatory Affairs Hire regulatoryacademy.com
- Regulatory Academy — How to Review a Colleague’s Regulatory Draft regulatoryacademy.com
This essay is provided for general educational purposes and reflects the regulatory landscape as of its publication date. It is not legal, regulatory, or career advice.
