On 1 June, CTO Greg Papadopoulos opened the application period for
two terms of Sun’s SEED – Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development
– Engineering mentoring program. The application period ends on 17
June. I get a fair number of questions from outside of Sun about how
to run a mentoring program so it is my hope that this topic will be
of general interest.
About SEED: program participants are expected to rise to the top of
Sun Engineering’s individual contributor or management ranks. The
current Recent Hire and Established Staff terms will be the 11th and
12th times we have run the SEED program since it started in 2001. There
have already been over SEED 315 Participants and over 190 Mentors
World-wide. External-to-Sun information about SEED is available from
several sources,including Sun’s Student Zone – Best of the Best page:
http://www.sun.com/corp_emp/zone/special.html
and the Sun home page article about SEED from last year:
http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2004-02-18.SEED.html
There have also been a number of press articles and SEED was a featured
best practice in the 2003 book Bit by Bit:Catalyst’s Guide To
Advancing Women In High Tech Companies.
Tanya Jankot has programmed the web-based application form so that it
displays and tallies itself on SEED’s passworded web site. So far, we
have 2 Recent Hire applicants (one in Shanghai and the other in Beijing)
and 8 Established Staff applicants (from Menlo Park CA USA, Beijing,
Broomfield CO USA, and Burlington MA USA). I am getting several queries
an hour from potential applicants and manager, mostly asking for selection
criteria clarifications.
We are still in the announcement stage for these terms. Greg’s email is
still being distributed around Sun – I have gotten copies back from five
or ten sources since Monday. I will be on a conference call next Tuesday
night for Sun staff in the Asia Pacific area who may be interested.
After running a special term for the Bangalore,India staff and the Beijing,
China staff earlier this year, it will be interesting to see what differences
there are in a world-wide Engineering open enrollment term.
KatysBlog 