All 49 of the SEED Engineering mentoring participants for the current
Established Staff term got their Mentor Wish Lists in by this
morning’s deadline. Tanya Jankot had already prepared all 49 participant
web pages for review by potential mentors. Once Tanya closed down the
list submission web page, she cleaned up the request summary list (fixing
name spellings mostly). Then, together she and I reviewed the list and prepared the first contact list. List edits
during this review included:
- Removing names of requested Mentors who already
indicated that they are unavailable to act as a Mentor. - Removing names of Mentors who are still working
with a SEED participant from a prior term. - Removing names of requested Mentors
who are not senior enough. (SEED mentors must be
the global equivalent of U.S. job grade
level 10 and above.) - Removing names of requested Mentors
who are too senior. (Executives above Senior Vice
President don’t have the time required by the SEED program
of its participating mentors.) - We made a decision in each case where more than one
Participant requested the same potential Mentor.
This is a common problem: as many as 15 people
requested the same Mentor. The primary basis for
this decision was the priority order on the Mentor Wish List
provided by the Participant. The Participant’s seniority (title or number of years at Sun) was used as a tiebreaker, with the more senior Participant getting preference. If they were the same seniority, we
went with whoever wrote the most convincing reason for preference.
After this review, we had our working contact list with the highest priority eligible Mentor from each participant’s Mentor Wish List.
For 31 of the participants, the highest priority eligible Mentor was also
their #1 choice. For 11 more, the highest priority eligible Mentor was
their #2 choice. For the rest, we had to go lower on their list.
I sent out all 49 emails asking that each potential mentor consider the
SEED participant who had requested them. Two Distinguished Engineers
responded immediately, writing they were interested and will follow up
with their potential mentee. We hope to hear back from the
others soon. All 49 participants should be matched within 2 months.
KatysBlog 