As I have now been a Mentor in the UK for nearly a year, I thought I would share my impressions of the current system and suggest some changes / improvements for discussion.
During the time I have been doing this, I had typically had about 20 mentees at any one time. I have had 4 new editors rise through the system to become Area Mangers at an earlier stage then would otherwise have been possible and 6 still editing occasionally at a lower, local level. I am currently still working with 22. However during that same time I have also had 27 drop out from editing so there is obviously improvements that need to be made to increase the number of successes.
The Current Selection Process
The initial contact with a new editor via the “Find More Mentees” tab seems to work quite well. In the UK the list of new editors is usually about 80-100 people (giving about 1000 a year to select from). From this, I usually select about 3-4 a month as possible mentees, those who I feel might benefit from mentoring and become a long term editor. In order to select about 50 from the 1000 over the year, the criteria I currently use is fairly simple.
- They need to have set up a user name, not still be working under the Waze default name.
- They need to have made around 50+ edits that I can view to see what they have done so far.
- They need to have edited on at least 2 different days, ideally more.
However there are a few things that would make this process better.
1 As well as listing the new editor’s user name, start (editing) date and number of edits, it would be good to be able to see the number of different days the editor has worked. I have found from experience that a new editor who does a lot of changes on a single day and then does no more is unlikely to want to become a regular editor, where as one who edits a few times on different days is more likely to keep doing it.
2 When following the link to the new editor to look at where they have been editing, it would be nice to be able to go back to the mentee listing in the place you left. Currently it goes back to your profile page and you have to re-open the list and scroll back down to where you were.
3 When an invitation is sent to a possible new mentee, the process needs to have some acknowledgement or acceptance by the mentee. Currently it just adds them to the list of my mentees and shows beside their name in their profile that they are being mentored. They need to actively accept this to indicate they want to be mentored.
4 When a mentee either stops editing or progresses to a point where they no longer need mentoring, the process allows for them to be removed from my mentee list. However it does not removed the “Mentored by” from their profile page. This needs to be fixed.
Other issues relating to Mentoring.
- As has been mentioned many times, the process needs to be able to accept editors outside the initial 30 day period. I understand these cannot be added to the current listing, as this would make it too long and difficult to handle. However it needs to be possible to add someone who is not on the list. Currently my mentees include 17 “official” ones through the current process and 6 “unofficial” ones who were outside the 30 day period when they approached me for mentoring. I treat all of these the same, but they do not have the “Mentored by” in there profile.
- Would it be possible to add a “Request for Mentoring” button to an editors profile page, so that they could initiate the contact with a mentor if they are interested? This would take a lot of the guesswork out of the selection of possible mentees.
- The Mentors and Mentees need a dedicated chat / communication channel. Currently it is all done via PM and a dedicated Mentoring Forum page within the UK Forum I have set up, but this is slow and not very interactive. Something similar to the Chat in the WME would be Ok if it worked, but this is useless at the moment as every time you refresh the page you lose the chat. Whatever was used would need to retain the chat threads. While I could set something up, I would prefer it be a Waze process which could then be shared with all the other Mentors so we can all learn from each other.
Finally, I think there are probably enough Mentors and we have sufficient experience to get together (currently online, but hopefully in future in person), to discuss our thoughts on the process. Anyone agree?
That is all I can think of for now.
All the best
Ian
(Ianinessex)
Ps, I was not sure where to post this as there seems to be several forum pages regarding Mentoring. Perhaps someone with the permissions and knowledge could clear these up into a single location?