Launching Mega Mentor
This post is co-written by Ale Canella, Kirsty Sinclair, Mathew Trivett and Afsa Akbar.
Today we’re launching Mega Mentor — a global mentoring service for those ready to step up into design leadership roles. Helping those with experience offer the time they do have to a variety of progressing designers, to help on project challenges and career development.
No long term commitments, no formalities, just help to develop the future of the industry.
For mentors
Deciding to be a mentor can be difficult: will this end up being another task on your plate? We are going to make it easy for you.
Sign up as a mentor, and offer your time and expertise, on your terms. We recommend 30 min slots, wherever they fit into your work schedule, as often as works for you. You can even try with a one-off and see how that goes.
We ask mentees to prepare and get ready for your chat, so you just need to show up. We know some Mentors apply the ‘no homework for me’ policy — feel free to get creative!
For mentees
Remember when you looked for a mentor and people never got back to you? Or when you simply didn’t know who to contact? You can browse all Mega Mentors easily on our website to find a person to help you with a problem or issue you’re finding in your work or career development.
Two rules: no selling or asking to be hired.
Why are we doing this?
Senior mentoring in the design industry is something that interests us. We’ve set up leads meetings, in London and in Scotland for those leading teams and/or design projects.
We do this because although there are many, many places for designers early on in their careers to find and receive design mentoring, there are very few for people further into their design careers.
We’ve seen the incredible work that’s put designers into organisational leadership positions, and we want to help more designers step up into those roles. We want to help the design industry flourish, and lead change in other industries too.
To do that, we need those with senior and leadership experience to help out those ready to take on these challenges.
Mega Mentor is about shifting the expectations around mentoring and making it work for us, now.
In our experience, it’s often awkward to ask such a person for their time.
Traditionally, mentoring is a formal relationship, and it takes time to nourish and build trust. For these reasons people who could be mentors can feel difficulty in committing the time to develop a less senior designer, so those asking often receive no answer.
So we wanted to make something that removed those awkward moments and made it easy to say yes to helping someone.
Get involved
- Help us trial it and if you have any feedback please send a private message on twitter.
- Sign up as a mentor and begin talking to those who could use your experience to further their development.
- Or browse the mentors we already have, to have a specific conversation with them.
Mega-mentor.com
@mega_mentor
Thanks!
Ale, Kirsty, Mat and Afsa
