The Mentoring Workplace and Badges

As a part of #mooc on #openbadges, we were tasked with describing an ecosystem that might at some point be served by openbadges. Now, step into my time machine and travel back to my grad school days where I did some work on a system that was meant to foster a 'Mentoring Workplace'.

The idea was to borrow ideas from the Pay It Forward Foundation to encourage growing a Community of Practice in a semi natural, somewhat organic manner. This is what I am basing my assigment off of.

1. Describe the ecosystem of this industry or community and provide an overview of how it currently works.

The Mentoring Workplace can exist in any environment where fostering and developing a solid Community of Practice is a desirable outcome. Informally, the Mentoring Workplace is simply the practice of somehow encouraging mentor-ship from individuals to individuals.

Every learning experience that an individual has as personally constructed is biased in the sense that the learner has used their own background to build that knowledge upon. Thus mentor-ship on any subject is useful no matter how or who is acting as a Learning Provider. The Mentoring Workplace takes advantage of this by encouraging sharing of knowlege. The Mentoring Workplace also considers mentoring to produce a useful artifact beyond that of the individuals in the way of documentation.

2. Describe the roles of the primary stakeholders in this ecosystem: learning providers, job seekers, and employers.

Learning Providers

In the mentoring workplace, we can refer to the mentors as the 'Learning Providers' stakeholders of our ecosystem. These individuals are expected to share their personally constructed knowledge of a skill, ideology, or perspective to mentees.

Job Seekers

In the sense that the mentees of the mentoring workplace are inherently interested in improving their knowledgebase for purposes of personal and professional growth, mentees represent the 'Job Seekers' of our ecosystem.

Because the idea of the mentoring workplace is to foster a free flow of knowledge and experience, at any time in practice Learning Providers can exist also as Job Seekers and vice versa. Playing both roles is encouraged and expected.

Employers

The mentoring workplace ecosystem exists entirely because the institution is interested in providing an environment that fosters knowledge growth, personal growth, and a community of practice that grows and evolves from the learning experiences of the individuals. The 'Employers' in this ecosystem are individuals that provide the environment and practices for the mentoring workplace to evolve.

3. Create personas/archetypes that represent each of the stakeholders.

Leslie the Learning Provider has been writing apps with the play framework for the past few months. She has constructed her own knowledge base including ideologies, opinions, and methods that are somewhat different from her piers. Teaching what she knows will help her to further develop her knowedge, and by participating in this program, she will have the opportunity to be mentored by others in areas that she has gaps.

Jerry the Job Seeker has just started writing apps with the Play Framework. While much or most of the skill can be developed on the job, he'll benefit from the experiences of others. He will be mentored by Leslie.

The Eastward Communications Employers are looking for a way to increase their overall community of practice in all areas of their core competencies. Furthermore, they will benefit from additional documentation of practices and services for onboarding new talent.

4. Write one or more “before badges” user stories that articulate specific problems or areas needing improvement in this ecosystem.

Before badges, the Eastward Communications Employers had instituted the Pay it Forward Mentoring program in their organization. Skills were mentored, and were 'payed forward' appropriately. While the program was effective, the documentation produced and the actual effort that went into the mandatory program was meant with varying degrees of success.

Eastward wanted to improve adoption of the program and tried several different tacks. Employees enjoyed the program, but saw little in the way of document able proof that the program existed. Some employees found it difficult to participate in a program that didn't add any sort of artifact to a resume.