August 23, 2023 | Harold Hare
Find Your Grind’s Mentors
Find Your Grind’s Mentor library is full of inspirational professionals to show students the human side of life and work.
One of the most engaging and unique aspects of Find Your Grind is our expansive Mentor library. We provide students with access to content from over 200 of the world’s most talented, diverse, and impactful people to help guide, inspire, and teach the next generation. While you might recognize a few names (will.i.am, Ruth E. Carter, Tony Hawk), all of our mentors are influential professionals at the forefront of living a lifestyle and finding a career to match.
You might think of mentors as the traditional, ongoing one-to-one relationship. This program is not that – although Find Your Grind’s curriculum does cover mentor relationships in depth. However, our Mentor content does end up meeting the same outcomes: informing, guiding, and setting goals.
Find Your Grind’s Mentor content is more of a virtual career ambassador, industry guide, and life coach all wrapped into one. Our Mentors provide personal experiences, impactful stories, and candid advice through video and written content about their journey, their passions and interests, lifestyle and decisions, how they got there, where they are going, and applicable Find Your Grind learning themes. With over 3,000 minutes of Mentor and Career content available for students, inspiration is easily accessible for all our users.
Find Your Grind’s Mentor program has three main goals:
- Humanize the world of work by sharing authentic and relevant stories
- Provide mentors students can relate to and be inspired by
- Give advice and set actionable steps for career exploration
Let’s explore these goals in a bit more depth.
Humanize the world of work by sharing authentic and relevant stories
Traditional career exploration is all about consuming dry and general information. But Find Your Grind knows that the real way to learn about careers and the workforce is from real people who have actually done it. Our user testing has shown that students prefer to hear from an actual person about their experiences and journey.
In a recent white paper written for Find Your Grind, Dr. Rudy Crew says:
“While it isn’t always true that today’s youth follow the career paths of their parents or significant adults in their lives, the kind of work, the attitude about work, and the sense of joy derived from work are always in plain sight to children of all ages, whether at home or in their community. And they watch with inquisitive, penetrating eyes…”
Our goal is to expand that community for students. Provide them opportunities to connect with and learn from Mentors that can peel back the curtain to life outside of school and inspire them to find happiness and live their intended lifestyle.
Provide students with mentors they can relate to and be inspired by
Find Your Grind’s Mentor library has over 200 mentors available, a number that continues to grow regularly. We know that every student isn’t going to connect with every mentor. So we strive to provide a wide range of Mentors from different races, ethnicities, genders, careers, backgrounds, and geographical locations.
A recent article from PBS NewsHour spoke with high-school students about why representation matters. In it, Sonali Chhotalal, a high-school junior in New Jersey said,
“We need to see people that look like ourselves and can say, ‘Oh, that looks like me!’ or ‘I identify with that’”.
This is the thinking that drives our mission of bringing on diverse mentors for students to relate to and learn from. Many studies have shown that representation increases student achievement, increases student self-esteem, and helps kids uncover who they are and who they want to be; all ideas that align with Find Your Grind’s mission.
Give advice and set actionable steps for career exploration
Inspiration means nothing if there isn’t action. This is why we ask our mentors to give students relatable advice and actionable steps they can take now to get started on a career path and living the life they want to live. Our mentors provide the context and real-world information about their career fields and also tell students the skills they need to be successful, the experiences to seek out, and the learning they can do now to prepare them for the world of work.
Of course, Find Your Grind’s Mentor content is just one piece of our revolutionary puzzle. It serves as the real-world context for the rest of our platform which includes our future proofing curricula and other Explore content: Careers, Skills, Lifestyles, and Industries, which together, prepare students for the future.
To learn more about Find Your Grind’s Mentor content or any of our other offerings, contact us.
If you are interested in becoming a mentor, or know anyone who may be, submit your interest.
