Professionalism Mentor

We are seeking volunteers with experience in and understanding of soft skills development for a high-impact role as a professionalism mentor. Volunteering as a mentor is invaluable and crucial work that will have a real impact on our developers, former Onja students, as well as on those who will follow them.

Within the framework of our volunteer framework, we will assess your professional background and what you can offer in terms of mentoring, and match you with one (or several, depending on your availability) mentee to have regular calls with them.

Your responsibilities include:

• Offering assistance, advice, and mentoring in terms of professionalism. This is likely to include communication skills, time management, balancing expectations, confidence building, and anything else non-technical related to working as a professional remote developer.
• Offer resources, exercises or articles so the mentee can perform some tasks in their free time to improve themselves.
• Talk about your own professional experiences
• Build a positive and constructive relationship with mentees.

May also include interview preparation:

• Perform mock interviews.
• Following mock interview practice, provide a written appraisal of the developers’ performance and areas for improvement.

About our developers

• Mostly female, all African and from underprivileged backgrounds.
• Each developer graduated high school in the top 1% of their peers and was selected for our programme from an initial pool of 200,000 students.
• During their training they have spent over 4,000 hours learning and writing HTML5, JavaScript, React, Redux, TypeScript and React Native and achieved advanced English level (B2-C1).
• After their training, Onja places the students in positions as software developers in European and US tech companies. Their technical skills have also expanded. We now have developers who can use other technologies such as Cypress, Next.js, Golang or PostgreSQL. In case a contract with a partner company ends, we are looking for new jobs for the developers. This is where your potential involvement in the interview preparation makes an invaluable contribution.  
• With a model proving to be highly impactful we are now focused on scaling and training hundreds of students in the coming years who will also benefit from the mentoring program. 

How It Works

• The program coordinators will schedule a call with you to explain more about Onja, the program and the role. If your values and experience align with our mission, we will match you with a mentee and schedule an introductory call.
• Ideally, a regular meeting frequency that you believe you can maintain for a prolonged amount of time is set with each mentee.
• We send monthly updates containing the mentee's observed progress, relevant information about the mentoring program, and news about Onja. The program coordinators will also schedule calls occasionally to collect feedback.
• We have 18 developers currently working at Onja, but sometimes, they need to prepare for interviews. If you decide to be available for interview preparation, we will reach out to you to schedule a mock interview when a developer is looking for a job. 
• If you are keen but worried about the time commitment or something else, let us know. We will do our best to work something out. 
• We suggest using Google Meet or Zoom for calls.