In Buenos Aires, New Hires Go Mentor-Hunting. In Amman, the Mentor Often Comes With a Family Tree Attached.

🇦🇷 Argentina · 🇯🇴 Jordan

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Ask a new hire in Buenos Aires who trained them and you will get a shrug and the name of a coworker who took pity on them near the coffee machine. Ask the same question in Amman and you may get an actual org chart, a named mentor, and possibly a cousin. Both countries agree that mentorship matters enormously. They disagree, fundamentally, on whether it should be planned.

🇦🇷 Argentina

🇯🇴 Jordan

Argentina's approach to onboarding is best described as structurally optional. According to OECD research on enterprise training, informal learning — the kind that happens through mentoring, job rotation, and simply watching a colleague work — accounts for more than 70 percent of total learning time inside firms, and workers who pick it up see roughly 3.5 percent higher wages on top of the returns from formal training. Argentina leans hard on that informal end of the spectrum: a country whose labor market runs a substantial share of employment through informal or semi-formal arrangements, per the OECD's own work on formalisation in Latin America, is not a country with a robust HR-department buddy system waiting for every new hire. What it has instead, based on accounts from Argentine professionals, is a culture where finding a mentor is a personal errand, not a company benefit. A Buenos Aires-based iOS engineer, interviewed for the developer newsletter GringoJobs about his path through Globant, OLX, and MercadoLibre before landing a remote role at Venmo, put the advice to newcomers plainly: find a mentor yourself, because nobody is going to assign you one, and expect to fail most interviews on the way to a job that actually teaches you something.

Hofstede Insights' framework helps explain why this works at all: Argentina scores high on uncertainty avoidance, meaning employees crave predictability, yet the culture remains strongly collectivist, with relationships and family-style loyalty substituting for procedure. The predictability gets outsourced to the social network rather than the employee handbook. A Quora respondent describing life as a developer at an Argentine startup made much the same point from the inside — the job came with real autonomy and even a remote option, but no one was going to walk them through it.

Jordan runs the opposite playbook, at least on paper. The ILO's Tripartite Action for Youth Employment project and UNICEF's EU-backed Azem programme both build mentorship directly into the hiring pipeline: new entrants get up to three months of paid, supervised on-the-job training plus a mentor assigned for the following year specifically to help them navigate problems. In an ILO-documented apprenticeship pilot in Amman's auto-repair sector, 53 apprentices were paired with experienced craftspeople and monitored throughout; 89 percent came out certified and employed. One apprentice, Ahmad Damiri, credited his mentor with monitoring his progress step by step after the classroom training ended — a level of structure that would strike an Argentine new hire as faintly bureaucratic and possibly suspicious.

But structure and fairness are not the same thing, and this is where Jordan's onboarding story gets complicated. The ILO also reports that roughly 70 percent of Jordanian employers admit that hiring decisions are shaped by wasta — the practice of family or tribal connections opening doors — and about a fifth of young Jordanians see it as their single biggest obstacle to work. The mentor assigned to you may be a genuine professional investment by the organization, or it may be an extension of exactly the network that got you hired in the first place. Formal, in other words, does not mean neutral.

The Reckoning, then, is a genuine paradox: Argentina's sink-or-swim onboarding is at least evenly distributed in its chaos — everyone is equally on their own — while Jordan's documented, mentor-assigned system can quietly reproduce whatever inequities existed before the hire walked in. Gallup finds mentored employees twice as likely to report real opportunities to learn and grow, and Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial survey found 86 percent of Gen Z and 84 percent of millennials naming mentorship as their top want from a manager — both workforces want the same thing, and are solving for it through opposite failure modes: absence of a system versus a system that isn't always what it claims to be.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Substack (GringoJobs) — a Buenos Aires iOS engineer described starting his career at a call center doing tech support, with no formal path into programming, and said the single best piece of advice for newcomers is to actively seek out a mentor because no employer will assign one.

Quora — a respondent working as a developer at an Argentine startup described having considerable day-to-day freedom, including a remote-work option, but no structured introduction to how the company actually operated.

ILO named-source interview — a young Jordanian apprentice in an Amman auto-repair training programme recounted how, after classroom instruction ended, an assigned mentor continued monitoring his work and progress at the garage.

UNICEF Jordan named-source story — a young jobseeker in the Azem on-the-job training programme described being paired with a qualified mentor for a full year alongside paid supervised training, calling the structured support central to her successful transition into her first job.

Conclusion

Neither model is obviously kinder to the newcomer. Argentina trusts the individual to build their own scaffolding, rewarding the resourceful and quietly punishing anyone without a network to tap for coffee-and-advice sessions. Jordan builds the scaffolding for you, then occasionally hands the blueprint to whichever family already had one. The practical lesson for anyone moving between the two labor markets: in Buenos Aires, bring a thick contacts list and a willingness to ask; in Amman, bring patience with process and a clear eye for who is doing the mentoring, and why. Onboarding, it turns out, is never really about the first week — it is about who an organization trusts enough to train the next generation, and neither country has fully solved for trusting the right people.