CASE wants to build online mentoring relationships within our membership communities to help grow our profession across the world. We want to build resilience at our education institutions to develop their capacity to face challenging times. Additionally, we envision this platform supporting member engagement, talent management and thought leadership–with an eye toward delivering positive global impact.

CASE welcomes the participation of all our members from vice presidents, directors and heads of teams to more early-stage professionals. You can be an effective mentor at any level:

• Mentors can be any age and at any stage in their career. It’s about sharing expertise.
• Mentors should represent all our communities of professional practice, including marketing, communications, alumni relations, fundraising and development services.
• Mentors can be from anywhere in the world. Examples: An alumni relations expert in the United States may be a brilliant person to help an African university start their alumni work. A marketing expert from Australia may be very helpful in Latin America. A U.K.-based social media guru may be in demand in Singapore.

Whatever age, stage, background or geography—our profession needs you.

You decide exactly how much you feel comfortable offering through this service. When volunteering as a mentor you choose from a list of mentor services that range from taking a few questions over email through to offering work shadowing/experience opportunity. You stay in control, being able to modify your offered services at any time.

A mentor can decide how many mentees s/he wishes to accept. For those who are new to mentoring, it may be appropriate to engage with just one or two to begin with, monitor progress with them, and take on others as and when you feel comfortable to do so.

The platform affords the mentor the opportunity to accept or decline a mentee, dependent upon the information given by the mentee. If insufficient information is given initially, you may request more before making a determination.

This is entirely up to you. You can decide to offer a work experience invitation to someone whom you were initially mentoring over the phone. There are no hard and fast rules as to how the relationship should progress.

To become a mentor simply go online to the eMentoring Platform. You will be prompted to provide initial profile information. There’s a handy function that allows you to quickly populate your profile information by using your LinkedIn profile (should you have one). Once you’re successfully signed on to the platform, you may switch on your mentor profile on your Mentor profile page by clicking the green button at the top of this page that says “Activate Mentor Profile”. You will be taken through a quick mentor set up process after which you will be searchable on the platform.

The platform’s tools let mentees search for mentors by geographic and interest areas, with online ways to connect and share. CASE envisions this cloud-based feature as an integral means to provide its members a virtual global environment in which to collaborate amongst members.

Each mentor on the platform has indicated the types of support they are willing to provide. These may include:

• Advice via email
• Advice via telephone/Skype
• Advice via social media
• Review a CV
• Review an application
• Meet face to face at mentor's location
• Work shadowing (observation only)
• Student internship

The strength of the platform is that it welcomes all professionals at all levels, with varied skill sets, so members can benefit from a mentor while themselves mentoring others by sharing their areas of expertise.

To become a mentee, go to the platform, simply complete your personal profile and then search for a mentor. Then send your prospective mentor a request to be mentored.