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Wildcat Career Network Quick-Start User Guide for Mentors

Welcome to CWU Wildcat Career Network Mentor Program! Being a Mentor offers many benefits to both you, as the Mentor, and your Mentee. Participating in Mentoring is a great way to expand your network and make a valuable impact on the career growth and development of others. Another great benefit—even as a Mentor, you can have Mentors too! To become familiar with the features and functionality of the Mentor product, here is a Quick-Start Guide to ensure you leverage all the tools. Ultimately, the experience is what you and your Mentee(s) make out of it—with WCN Mentoring, we’ve simply given you an easy-to-use platform and access to a valuable community to enable you to offer and have the most rewarding experience possible!

I. Mentors Accessing Mentoring

As a Mentor, there are several ways you can gain access to the CWU Career Services Wildcat Career Network.

To get started, visit www.cwu.edu/~career and click on the Wildcat Career Network Icon (bottom left of screen)

. You will either need to create an account; use your existing sign in credentials if you already have an Experience account; or if your System Administrator created an account for you and sent you a username and password, you may use that. Once you sign in:

1. If the System Administrator has required verification, when you sign in to the system, you will immediately have access to all the Experience benefits and once you receive access to The Wildcat Career Network Mentoring Program, you will see it in your system.

II. Your Mentor Homepage

Your Mentor Homepage is well, your home base, where you will be able to:

Ø Manage your Mentor Profile and Settings

Ø Manage your connection requests

Ø Search for your own Mentors

Ø View/manage your connected Mentees and Mentors, and their contact information

Ø Tag your Mentees and Mentors, if applicable, which means you can categorize or describe your connections using keywords.

III. Setting up your Mentor Options/Profile

When you become a Mentor, you will always have some pre-populated information in your Profile, whether it’s data collected either by you during your create-an-account process or by your System Administrator if he/she created an account for you.

It is important to take these steps when you first sign-in as a Mentor:

1. Select your Settings: A huge benefit of Experience Mentors is control. In “Settings”, select your desired level of participation, which enables you to control how many Mentees you have at one time. You can also adjust your Mentor status within your Settings.

2. Update your Profile: This contains your latest contact information (which will remain private until you accept Mentee connection requests), objectives, and the type of guidance you’d like to provide, so it’s important to keep them current.

3. Update your Resume: Both your Mentor Profile and Resume exist in the Experience Portfolio, which is a tool to help users showcase their experience and skill sets. In Portfolio, the Resume section contains your Education History and Work Experience, in addition to other components such as Professional Overview, Skills, Certifications and Organizations. It’s important to keep at least your Education History and Work Experience updated, as this information is helpful for Mentees as they search for relevant Mentors. When you are in the Resume section, you will have the option to “Edit” or “Add” a Resume. The remaining sections of Portfolio are Experiences and References, which you are welcome to populate into your Mentor Profile, if desired. Here is an example of the view of a Mentor Resume populated with Education History in Portfolio:

Getting back to your Mentor Profile: Once you have edited your Resume, you can get back to your Mentor Profile in two ways:

a. In your upper toolbar/navigation, go to Networking, then select WCN Mentoring to go to your Mentor Homepage.

b. In your upper toolbar/navigation (which you can see in the above screenshot next to Networking, click on “Portfolio” and you will see your Mentor Profile listed under Shared Views.

IV. Managing Connection Requests

Accepting/Declining

When a Mentee is interested in connecting with you as a Mentor, you will receive an email from the Mentee. Your connection requests will also appear in the right margin of your Homepage as requests “sent to you”. You simply “Accept” or “Decline” the request and this status will appear in the Mentee view. Any requests you do not take action on will appear as “Pending” in the Mentee view—“Pending” requests expire after 30 days.

Note the helpful tool below, which enables you to view the email request message sent to you by the Mentee.

Auto Email

Once you’ve accepted a Mentee’s request, an automated email is sent to that Mentee to confirm that you have accepted.

V. Managing your Connections

From your Mentor Homepage, you can view all the Mentee(s) you are connected to along with some key profile data and any tags you have created. If you have chosen to take advantage of the benefit of being able to HAVE a Mentor as well as be a Mentor, you will also be able to view your Mentor(s).