It's finally July, and Cycle 2 of the Community Mentors Program is in full swing!
Huge thanks to our Cycle 1 pilot run participants - we've had really great feedback from our first few pairs, and we're now ready to scale a little bigger for Cycle 2! 100% of Cycle 1 participants who responded to the feedback survey agreed that the Community Mentors Program is a good initiative and that they would like to continue participating in future cycles of the program. In fact, many of them have chosen to continue in their current pairings, with some mentors saying that they are looking to dedicate more time in the upcoming cycle to fully invest and focus on developing their current mentees. We think that this is good news especially since building long-term mentoring relationships is often critical in paving the way for potentially identifying your personal career sponsors!
Additionally, 100% of Cycle 1 participants also said they would recommend their friends and coworkers to participate as well, so we certainly have our work cut out for us as we strive to scale and get people paired up as quickly as possible, without compromising on the quality/fit of the pairings.
In Cycle 2, we are thrilled to have participants from over 14 countries (US, UK, Canada, South Africa, Turkey, The Netherlands, France, Hungary, India, New Zealand, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, just to name a few!). Our mentees come from a variety of diverse social, cultural and professional backgrounds - some are ethnic minorities, while others self-identify as having some form of disability or neurodiversity such as autism, ADHD, amongst others. We also have the privilege of having a few former military vets and moms returning to the workforce after taking a couple of years off to tend to family. We believe that it's the diversity of our mentoring community that makes this program truly meaningful, valuable and enriching for participants.
Our mentors come from both within, and outside of Microsoft as well - many are MVPs, although we also have a number of experienced industry professionals from top companies such as Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, American Graphics Institute etc stepping up and volunteering as mentors. Also, get this: the combined experience of our Cycle 2 participants totals up to over 647 years of combined industry experience! Absolutely phenomenal indeed.
While we do not disclose info about our mentees or non-MVP industry mentors for their privacy (unless they tell us they'd like to be featured!), we're proud to celebrate our Cycle 2 MVP mentors who have chosen to not only dedicate their time and energy powering discussions on the Tech Community, speaking at tech conferences and sharing their knowledge about technology in the industry, these MVPs have also committed valuable time in their hectic schedules to volunteer as Community Mentors. Kudos to all of you!
Want to participate in the Community Mentors Program in the upcoming cycles? Submit your application here today! If you've already applied previously and haven't heard back, stay tuned and rest assured we'll notify you soon as there's a match.
Happy mentoring/learning, everyone! :)