Northrop Grumman Mentors

[arizonafoxx]

Greetings,

I recently transitioned to a position with Northrop Grumman. As a company they were thrilled with my FRC background and the fact that I have mentored for over 8 years. They immediately gave the team I am mentoring a grant to help out and have had the team give multiple demonstrations. This has shown me that my branch office does care about FRC and my team. However when I asked for them to give me time off to travel with the team HR said that the corporate policy is that any volunteer work would require a PTO request. As many of you mentors know traveling for competition alone is like 40 hours a season if not more. So out of the two weeks I get as a new employee half of it is used to travel and work my butt of with the team. I would prefer to keep my PTO for my family.

What I am wondering is how other Northrop Grumman employees handle this. If you know one of your mentors is an NG employee please ask them and let me know. I am wondering if there is some accounting bucket that seasoned NG employees use to justify their time with the team. I have asked my boss if I could use my mentoring as a professional development opportunity and fill out the continuing education paperwork and the travel authorization paperwork to create a paper trail for accounting. His response is do you get any type of credits at the end of a season from the school or USFIRST. I noticed that FTC has something like this. Does anyone know if FRC does?

I understand sometimes corporate policy is what it is and there is no working around it, but there are just too many NG mentors out there in our community and I find it hard to believe that all of us are taking PTO. Northrop Grumman also sponsors regional competition from time to time. This is why I feel that maybe my branch office just doesn't know that there is a USFIRST time allowance for NG employees. I think when HR asked corporate what the policy is on volunteering for a high school they did not give very much detail as to what I was actually doing. At least that is my hope.

Again if anyone is or knows of Northrop Grumman mentors out there please let me know if they have to take PTO when they travel with the team.

Thank you in Advance