Virtual Mentor

An online application, co-developed with the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), that enables employers, workforce boards, and education providers to invite diverse workers or alumni within a community to share their career journey stories via a combination of structured data, short videos, text, and audio and then share these with prospective workers or students online. Help underrepresented students and workers see themselves in new careers with Virtual Mentor!
Virtual Mentor starts with high school and allows you to add additional education as applicable

Features

  • Provides local communities and organizations to curate a collection of personalized success stories from leaders and role models in their organization or community
  • An administrative role enables organizations to recruit virtual mentors through an email invite, enables virtual mentors to create their “success story” through an intuitive step-by-step by step “virtual interview”, and enables administrators to review and approve these stories to be “published” to their virtual mentor digital library
  • Published success stories are shared via API to any website or career advising application, to include applications offered by Vantage Point (Career Futures, Exponential Pathways, PathBuilder)
  • Comprehensive quality control and content administration capabilities, ensures that success stories are engaging, comprehensive, and audience-appropriate
  • Built-in analytics enables organizations and virtual mentors to track reach and impact of the stories they have shared

Benefits

  • Inexpensively curate and share success stories from community leaders, alumni, and other role models at the push of a button
  • Seamlessly integrate with your website or existing applications to publish engaging content directly to students and other young people
  • Scale the number of stories collected from leaders, alumni and others through a mobile friendly app that walks them through the process
  • Maintain total control of your database of success stories – easily activating, editing, and refreshing as needed
  • Expose youth to people in their community and how they might conduct their own in-person mentor interview modeling the Virtual Mentor stories
Virtual Mentor allows you to edit your career and education timeline

Use Case

CAEL and Vantage Point were the recipients of a Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) grant to help advise historically disadvantaged high school students on entry into alternative career pathways after high school. Our team developed Exponential Pathways (XP) as a high school advising tool but we needed a scalable way to help youth see themselves in occupations that were not typically visible to them (e.g.STEM occupations). Virtual Mentor is being used to curate local stories from diverse workers in communities where XP is being deployed and surface these via API to youth in context of the career pathways they are exploring, matching virtual mentors to biodemographic characteristics of the youth, where appropriate.

Clients

The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning Buffalo Futures

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