By Nate Waddington, Head of Mentorship & Documentation, CNCF
Technical people have a world of opportunities available to them when it comes to boosting career skills. But I’m going to make the case for taking a somewhat old-fashioned route: mentorship.
A “mentor” is an experienced and trusted advisor, while a mentee is the person advised, trained or counseled by a mentor. Sometimes these pairings happen organically, but sometimes nature needs a bit of a push, and that’s where we come in. CNCF, in partnership with the Linux Foundation and Google’s Summer of Code, has been offering a Mentorship Program for over four years, and to date more than 300 mentors and mentees have teamed up to learn from one another.
Our Mentorship Program is not an internship, however; no one is getting hired, though the process does resemble a job application, at least from the mentee side of things. That said, stipends are available (and vary, depending on your location).
Three times a year, roughly following the North American academic calendar, we offer 12-week mentorship programs that give participants a chance to work intensely on a challenge set by one of our accepted projects. For this upcoming term, Term 3, which runs September through November of 2024, mentees will apply to work on 49 different proposals from 21 different projects ranging from “a new gadget for detecting deadlocks” for Inspektor Gadget, “enhancing the Prometheus Benchmark Suite,” or “adding new getting started examples” to Vitess. The accepted projects are a result of mentors volunteering these ideas, and submitting them via a pull request in GitHub. Potential mentees won’t be applying blind – the GitHub repo has full details of what the challenges will be, who the mentors are, what the expected outcome(s) could be, as well as a list of recommended skills.
Mentees, if this is tempting now or in the future, start here with this guide to mentee-ship.
The benefits to mentees
Although not every mentee is a student, our Mentorship Program does offer clear benefits for those looking for that first job in tech. Mentees are able to show, concretely, the steps taken to identify and ultimately solve a problem with actual code snippets, PRs, MRs, critiques, etc., giving technical recruiters exactly what they’re looking for during an interview. Also, mentoring is another word for “networking” which of course is particularly beneficial for those new to the field. Mentees can also have the advantage of trying different technologies out before committing to them – observability and Wasm are fairly different areas of expertise, just to choose two randomly, and it can be nice to sample what’s out there without having to make a long term commitment. Mentees can become mentors and even project maintainers and go on to have long and fruitful careers in the cloud native landscape…all because of a mentorship program!
But don’t just take my word for why mentees benefit: Mohammed Affan shared everything he learned during his menteeship last summer.
The benefits to mentors
Meanwhile, mentors benefit too, perhaps just as much – or more! – than mentees. Mentoring gives employees an opportunity to train, coach, and help grow new talent, and that can be something they don’t have access to in their regular job. Done right, mentoring helps grow “team cloud native” and expand enthusiasm for all things Kubernetes, which is great but complicated for newbies. Mentors naturally grow their network, which is beneficial to their careers, but they also grow their management skills, something which aids them and their employers. Also, employee retention and recruitment is challenging today; mentoring can be a fabulous recruitment tool, but it can also be a way to offer talented individual contributors a way to grow their skills in a different direction. Mentoring is a concrete and documented way to grow personnel and project management skills.
Mentorship best practices
But mentorships are most effective when everyone gives it their best effort.
Here’s some of what we’ve learned from overseeing hundreds of these over the last few years:
For Mentees
- Complete Your Profile: Fill out your profile completely—GitHub, LinkedIn, resume, openprofile.dev, etc. Help recruiters find you!
- Document Everything: Keep track of your progress and blog about it if possible. Work in the open, tell the story of your mentorship, and link back to issues and PRs as evidence of what you’ve learned and accomplished.
- Plan Your Path: If you’re a mentee, you can only participate in our mentorship program once. Beginners may want to start with Google Summer of Code before considering our program—doing ours first could make you ineligible for GSoC as it requires mentees to be a beginner to open source software development.
- Stay Connected: Keep in touch with your new community. Ideally, continue contributing, but your relationships with your mentors and peers don’t have to end when the mentorship does.
For Mentors
- Promote Your Work: Be sure to add your mentorship experience to your socials and promo packets.
- Remember the Purpose: It’s a learning experience for both you and your mentee!