WooTech started out as a small Facebook community that helps connect people with mentors, and it has grown with a support of more than 500 followers!
We are still pretty small, but we hope that we can stay true to our mission for helping people navigate and up skill their careers in Technology.
Stemming from this vision, we are hoping to launch our own collaborative-open source mentor ship session this time!
Our approach so far has been to on-board mentors, mentees and make a right match between the sign ups, allowing them for great partnership! The major drawback of this approach is that we don’t dictate how a mentor or mentee should make the most of their mentor ship period. This makes it vague, and open-ended. People don’t know what to talk or ask their mentors, while mentors also don’t know how to extract information from their mentees. Some people end up working on actual projects, some just end after a few discussions and advice sessions.
So, we want to try a different approach this time — where people can do more than just talking or sharing. The thought behind this idea is similar to Google summer of code, Outreachy, FOSS asia— get people to learn by real coding. There will be a few differences from these traditional programs though, majorly:
- Mentees will work in teams on opensource projects, however, each group will be allocated a project from scratch, and will be responsible for seeing it through end-to-end i.e. from design, to code, to deployment.
The reason for doing so is that we want to take in either beginners (year 1/2) or even seniors/working-professional with less technical exposure in their resume. There are several resource to learn to code, or even contribute, however, doing a project completely from beginning to end helps build more expertise - Each group of Mentees will have few Mentors assigned to them based on the project. The mentors will be the “project leads” and “architects” — hence, it will be a great experience for people in their careers who want to take up leadership and architectural roles.
- Mentors will also be given an induction training on WooTech mentorship principles and guidelines on how to interact with the mentees so that our mentors can uphold our principles. More on what these principles are in another post!
There are, of course, a few disadvantages to this than our former approach, for example, we may not be able to cater to mentor-ship in some niche fields or domains. Most mentors and projects will be limited to the the popular fields as of now. But hopefully with progress this can also be tackled in the future. The session will require more time commitment and passion by both the mentees and mentors, with more focus on collaboration, weekly meetings with mentors and peers.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign-up already and we will get back to you on your application soon.
And if you have any further questions, leave them in the comments below or send us a message here
