Presidential Update
President’s Corner – Pairing Learners with Experience
Announcing a Mentor Program
May 2020
I’m excited to write to you this month about our third strategic objective. The Fort Worth chapter has received requests for many years for mentoring. We’ve made a few false starts, and had a number of small wins as well as informal relationships always. As we strive to be an essential advisor for emerging professionals of all stripes in the project management industry, developing a formal mentor program has become more important.
During our annual planning session last year, the leadership team performed an exercise where we analized our membership and defined a number of member profiles or stakeholder value propositions. In this analyis we determined that some of these member or stakeholder groups such as new members joined to receive mentorship from experienced practitioners for career advice as well as acquiring certifications. Moreover our long time experienced members had a desire to give back in the form of mentoring. We have a natural supply and demand for a mentor program.
Our third objective for 2020 is to Enhance stakeholder skills in a safe and fun environment:
This objective aims to Create a mentoring program. It is comprised of three supporting actions or steps:
- Create mentor model and identify member mentors. Define mentoring model; procedures; rules of engagement; etc
- Identify mentees from the Young & Emerging Professionals Group, college student populations, military outreach team, or any new member requesting mentoring, etc. and pair with mentors (1:1). Establish pairing relationships.
- Create mentoring workshops (i.e. resume , interiewing, certification ). Schedule or recast workshops with partners.
Our first important step towards creating a mentoring program was the appointment of Zach Valigura to the position of Director of Mentors within the Internal Relations team. (email address: mentorprogram@fwpmi.org) Zach is responsible for the design and implementation of the program and he has proven to be a fireball of energy so far. We are excited to have him in this role. Below is an overview of Zach’s initial vision for how this program will work:
We look forward to rolling out applications and guidelines soon.
And hoping to seeing you all at a chapter event soon…
Cindy
