| Role | Design Mentor |
| Category | Coaching, User Experience |
| Date | May 2020 – August 2020 |
My Role
I joined LevelUP! Round 2 mentorship programme organised by NTU Career & Attachment Office (CAO) to coach 2 NTU undergraduates who are interested to learn hard skills relevant to the IT industry. Throughout the 3-month programme, I taught the students UX, UI, Design Thinking process and Agile Scrum methodology:
- Provided career advice, shared industry insights and study tips
- Helped students to discover their current strengths and weaknesses
- Set up an action plan and enable students to set achievable goals
- Prepared presentation slides and other course materials for bi-weekly topic sharing sessions
- Gave a total of 4 assignments to aid their learning
- Conducted review sessions to improvise their deliverables
- Invited 3 industry professionals to share their career journies and topics such as front-end development and project management
The Process
Goal Setting
Before accepting the students as my mentee, I used the Mentor Canvas as a starting point to understand the students better. This canvas is modified by a UX designer based on the Business Model Canvas used in Agile/UX workshops.
Career Exploration
During our first meeting, the students filled up a survey for me to better understand their interests and behaviours. Using their responses as a guide, I suggested some relevant jobs in the IT field.
Actionable Plan
I worked with the students to set up an actionable plan. To make the sharing sessions more productive, the students are required to self-study and prepare questions prior to our meetings. Each lesson came with a new assignment to practise what they have learned.
Topic Sharing Sessions
Other than creating a presentation deck, I also prepared course materials such as Adobe XD demo files, online resources and additional self-study links to strengthen the students’ understanding of the new concepts.
Hands-On Assignments
The students had 2 weeks to complete each assignment. I introduced the use of Kanban boards for progress tracking.
Review Sessions
During each review session, the students presented their work before I shared some general feedback for improvements. Additional comments would come in after I go through individual deliverable in detailed.
Retrospective Sessions
Initially, I had a 1-1 retrospective session with the students. However, I wanted to simulate a Sprint retrospective experience where multiple people can share their feedback, therefore I changed it to a group retrospective session (although they were given solo assignments).
Additional Study Resources
Aside from the topics taught, I also gave the students some study materials and keywords to explore themselves.
(My Personal) Evaluation by Mentees
After every topic sharing session, I let the students filled up a course feedback survey to state what I should improve on and how I can improve their learning experience.
The Outcome
(My Personal) Feedback from Mentees
In our final meeting, I let the students filled up an evaluation survey on everything that has been shared throughout the 3-month programme
(Official) Feedback by Mentees
The following reviews were submitted to NTU CAO:
My Learnings
Being a mentor has made me a better communicator. In order to introduce a technical term to my young audience, I had to explain the context in a language appropriate to their skill level.
Throughout these 3 months, I felt that I have become a more disciplined person during non-working hours. Aside from preparing decks for each sharing session, I had to invest some time in researching and validating my industry knowledge before structuring my thoughts into a presentation flow.
Overall, it was a great learning opportunity for me too.
