Chapter 21. THE MENTOR MARKETPLACE

Christie Dowling and Victor Gulas

As professionals enter the workplace and look to rapidly increase their skills, understanding of the company, and professional network, many of them ask for help identifying a mentor. Although the mentor–protégé relationship is a very personal one, many companies try to create matches through formal mentoring programs. These can be great, especially for pairing new employees who have a particular technical focus with mentors who understand the area. However, formal mentoring programs, for which organizations often have very high expectations, do not necessarily create successful matches and can go too far in prescribing the terms of the relationship. In addition, formal programs, especially ones with a technical focus, often do not address employees' intangible needs to get to know the corporate culture and develop a network of colleagues.

Informal mentoring networks often develop to meet those needs. In such cases, eager protégés often seek out mentors on their own. We at MWH, a large, geographically dispersed engineering firm, developed the Mentor Marketplace to increase the number of potential connections between mentors and protégés, and to allow mentoring relationships to develop beyond the typical limitations of technical career mentoring. The Mentor Marketplace is not a formal organizational program; it is a web-enabled tool that exists simply to facilitate informal connections between those in MWH looking for a mentor and those who want to mentor. Mentoring relationships in MWH tend to result from chance encounters. The purpose of the Mentor Marketplace is to increase the frequency of those encounters.