Development Goal: Create a Scalable System of Personalized Professional Development
Why This is a Priority
Only so much can be gleaned from articles, videos, templates, and one directional large group communications People need to see and hear from people have shared lived experiences to feel a sense of belonging and a confidence that they, too, can achieve their goals. Our current professional development methods do not follow our strategy of personal support and relationship building in smaller groups. Of the activities our organization chooses to pursue, professional development is significantly weaker with less resources and focus than education and networking.
Justification and Sources
Community based input, including surveys of new programs we should offer and energy from our volunteers has suggested we should be working on professional development. More objectively, research mentors in our Neuromatch courses have complained that they didn't feel like they understood what they should be offering students, our online format makes speaking event engagement low, and there is strong research-backed evidence that creating situations for identity matched mentorship strongly supports persistence.
Stakeholder Impact
Ideally this should produce better persistence and career outcomes for our students, but also provide greater satisfaction for our mentors, instructors, and content experts.
What Does Success Look Like?
A system or group of programs that matches people into small group or one on one discussions with professional development advisors to help facilitate building real relationships for potential long term mentorship. The solution should affect both the professional development we offer during the courses and come up with solutions for professional development separately from our courses. The solution should be systematic and scale to many courses in many domains.
Success needs to be seen in participant satisfaction on both the student and instructor side. Most of them should rate the program as good or excellent OR we should have hard data that shows useful career outcomes.
How is Success Measured?
Ultimately success of these programs will be measured by their impact on our primary aspirations, but we can also measure success by surveying or interviewing professional development mentors and students to see if they feel satisfied with professional development offerings. We will look to see that both the course based and non-course based programs have been implemented.
Subprojects
To achieve this goal, there are several systems or challenges we have to create or overcome. They are roughly in order of completion since subgoals build upon previous subgoals.
To start working on one of these, create a team page under Research and Development, and then claim that subgoal with that team by adding your team page link in the appropriate column. Read more at 
Research and Development .
Research and Development .
Create a method for allowing trainees and mentors to match with each other on fitting topics at times that fit them
Many ways to do this. Could look to Development Goal: Improve Professional Development Materials for ideas for topics or use something smarter like a matching algorithm.
Create an interface and signup page for mentors to enter into the system
Must make requirements for mentors incredibly clear. They should know what they are signing up for, how much time, and when.
Create a system for scheduling mentor and trainee events
Must provide mentors with specific day and time in their timezone, ideally with a calendar invite, and instructions and expectations when joining the call.
Come up with a method to mesh this professional development event into student project time in our academy courses
It should follow academy project timezones and be able to be displayed in student dashboards in the portal.
Adapt the above to be useable for ongoing events of this nature that happen throughout the year
This is a BIG subgoal. It can probably be broken into smaller goals such as developing a system for alerting appropriate alumni, automating the process so that mentor signups automatically create new events that appropriate alumni are notified of, and more.
Create a system for delivering surveys to the above to measure success
These should be small, quick, and easy and be delivered to both the mentor and attendees.
Create a system for evaluating or measuring and recording event attendance
This may be built into the platform that we use to facilitate these or it may be separate.