Why doesn’t LinkedIn have a “Mentorship” box in their “Opportunity Preferences” which lets professionals express that they’re open to helping students/young professional with career advice/decisions. And if this was checked, a mentee would be able to InMail the potential mentor without needing a premium account. Prevent abuse by allowing mentor to mark a mentee request as spam, in which case the individual is blocked from participating in the mentorship program.
The opportunity here is that many kids lack professional role models so let’s do a better job of matching them with advisors, even if it’s just a virtual relationship.
LI could also decide to make mentorship one of the attributes they care about, and give people the option of adding this as an accomplishments field to their profile based on double opt-in disclosure of “Person X menteed Person Y.”
Meg, Jeff – this would be a great LinkedIn For Good project, no?
Interesting idea. I have been trying to transition from the financial industry to startup for the last few months and have managed to get advise from various people through meetups and events in NYC. I can see immediate benifits of having the opportunity to connect on a continued mentor basis with someone who has gone through a similar transition. I am sure I am one of the thousands there who would agree. LinkedIn would be the obvious choice, but do you potentially see an opportunity for a startup that exclusively helps foster this interaction ?
I think it would be hard to bootstrap getting people to “list” themselves, but if you could start w the LinkedID API or maybe FB Connect, then perhaps but i think it would be a labor of love rather than outsized business success. You could bootstrap by getting critical mass in a geography or industry. or try to work w communities of mutual interest (trade associations, college alumni offices, boys & girls club, etc).