FIRST Mentor Network: Matching Mentors with Teams for Success
2022 NOV 29 | Written by Natalie Turcotte, Sr. Manager, Systems and Training
As teams get into the swing of the season, they might need additional help and expertise. The FIRST® Mentor Network sponsored by NI is here to help. The community platform provides new and returning FIRST teams access to passionate, engaged mentors, while giving mentors the opportunity to use their unique skill sets and have meaningful involvement with one or more teams. The platform is available to participants in the US and Canada*.
Mentors are ready to help with in-person or remote mentoring and cover a variety of skill sets, both technical and non-technical. Whether you need a little help or a lot, there are over 800 mentors waiting to help. To get started, have your lead mentor create a post on the FIRST Dashboard and build your team’s profile. Your lead mentor can seek out and communicate with candidates to find the best fit. Create your team profile today!
*FIRST Mentor Network is only available to teams in U.S.A and Canada. All participants of the FIRST Mentor Network must be at least 18 years old and complete FIRST Youth Protection screening.
The success of these things is based on the broad buy in from both teams looking for mentors, and potential mentors looking for teams. The barrier of entry is relatively high, since a FIRST account is required.
I had a volunteer approach me this week asking about teams in a certain area that may be looking for mentors, and I directed them to start with a search on here and see where that takes them. I have no idea how many teams are listed on here, but given the lower barrier of entry for teams, I’d imagine it is more saturated with teams than mentors.
Yeah… that’s what I’m just not sure about here. It seems like it is missing part of the core issue with barriers to communication for teams and where those lines of communication need to exist and what the barriers are.
I’m not knocking it - someone spent time coding this and trying to make it work and likely with a highly restrictive set of policies and process around it. I’m just not sure that it’s working as intended. I also have to acknowledge that asking the CD crowd about it is not going to get me real answers and only that can come from whatever data the site generates… whatever that may be.
FWIW, we had 1 person reach out to us about being a mentor who was in a different state and I had a nice chat with them. I also have been reached out to a couple times and I found the alerting to be very hit/miss as to if it was being picked up by my spam folder or even working. I responded and directed them to email as they were someone who was just trying to get in touch with me about something FRC related IIRC.
I was curious if there were teams looking for help on there a little bit ago and one thing that I noticed was that to search for teams you had to create an account on firstinspires.org, and then create a “profile” before you could see teams looking for help. This isn’t all that much effort but it did take 10-15 minutes before I could look at teams, more effort than someone casually browsing to see if there are local teams needing help would likely do. (i.e. really only alumni/current volunteers or people going out of their way to volunteer)
The other issue, as you’ve likely found out, is that teams looking for mentors have to create a “post”, involving uploading a “featured image”, writing a headline and description and adding various mentor roles they’re looking for.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it’s not hard to do these things, but it’s more difficult than just a team going “hey, we’re looking for help”, and someone seeing it and offering help.
