eCo-op Mentor Responsibilities

Thank you for volunteering your time, energy, and expertise in becoming a mentor for an Algonquin College co-op student as they pursue their entrepreneurial business dreams. Your mentorship can make the difference between a great success and a frustrating failure.

Below, you will learn more about the structure of the program designed to help keep your mentorship experience on-track.

Getting Started

Start by telling us a bit about who you are through the Mentor Application form. We use this information to ensure we have the right mix of mentors for our diverse learners. Once we have your information, we will book a quick phone call to go over some of the specifics about our program and then add you to our mentor pool.

Finding your Mentee(s)

We want our students to be action-oriented so we encourage them to connect directly with our mentors. We will provide our students a website through which they can review a brief bio of our mentors, and then reach out to you directly. After your initial contact with a student, we will consider the “match to be made” once our student submits the eCo-op Mentorship Agreement, which is jointly agreed to by you and your mentee. At this stage, you would have met with the student, reviewed their LEAN Canvas Business Plan, and set parameters for the mentorship experience.

The Mentorship Experience

During the four months that you are working with your eCo-op student, we ask that you schedule to meet with them a minimum twice per month. Ideally, our mentors could meet with our students once a week, but we understand that schedules may not always allow for this. The best practice here is to set a reoccurring time each week to meet and commit to a valuable conversation.

Your mentee is required to develop learning objectives for the four months ahead. The first task of your mentorship experience will be to review these with your mentee and help to guide them through setting realistic objectives for what can be accomplished in four months. These are learning objectives would be focused on the student’s intentional growth though this experience.

Regular Meetings

During this time, we ask our mentors to help our students see their work from different angles and perspectives – this is best accomplished by asking reflective questions. The following seven questions are good opening questions that can be asked at different times during your mentorship experience to help gain insight into your mentee’s business ideas, planning, and ways you can help.

  • Review goals & objectives
  • Discuss Work Term Consultation at mid-point
  • What is working in your business right now (how do you know)
  • What is not working (how do you know)
  • What countermeasures have you developed / put in place to overcome these challenges / meet your goals
  • What areas do you think you can address on your own, and where do need more support
  • How can I help you in achieving your business goals.

Informal meetings and communication are also encouraged and can help keep your mentee on track – these can be short emails or phone calls to help your mentee around a roadblock.

Midway Check-in

Approximately halfway through your mentorship experience we will be in touch with a brief questionnaire to you and your mentee (separately) to ensure that everything is on track, and to see how the College can help, if needed. Please take a few moments to let us know how it is going – we love to hear successes, and are ready to help if roadblocks are in the way.

Exit Meeting

Near the end of the students work term, your mentee will provide you with a formal document to complete that captures your feedback on their performance and their eCo-op Reflective Assignment. The exit meeting is a great time discuss it. The last step in your mentorship experience is to meet with your mentee to provide them with your impressions of their growth over the past four months, and some suggestions of what that can do to remain on the right track.

You may collectively choose to continue this mentorship experience beyond the four-month work term, although this is not an expectation of any of our mentors, we would encourage and support this activity if both parties are gaining value from the experience.