For Mentors
Thank you for considering serving our GIS community as a MAGIP GIS mentor. Being a mentor offers many benefits:
- Contributing as a visible, effective, and on-going professional development leader benefits the overall use of GIS in Montana, thereby strengthening communities across the state.
- Assisting with data production and documentation enables more data sharing and confidence in the use of data.
- Offering to assist in a Peer-to-Peer rapport can strengthen your own skill set.
- Mentoring can generate a feedback mechanism to MAGIP regarding the kinds of training resources MAGIP could offer to its membership (conferences, webinars, website resources).
- If you mentor a student or a young professional, you may receive credit on your path to becoming a GISP or to maintain your GISP. See the GISCI website for details.
Effective mentors are good listeners and teachers. Part of the task of mentoring involves determining the kind of assistance needed. Does the person need general guidance related to career development? Is there another MAGIP member who can more easily or quickly assist this person for a particular task? Is the problem at hand one that can be solved by redirection to a Help file or online learning resource? Does this person need more training in general to accomplish their work tasks? Effective mentors should feel equally comfortable redirecting people to independent learning tools in addition to simply answering questions or walking someone through a process.
Note: Mentors can choose not to mentor someone (or terminate a rapport) if the mentee’s interests are not a good match or if the mentee's preparation and/or motivation are unsatisfactory or do not meet agreed upon expectations.
MAGIP members who would like to serve as a GIS mentor, follow these steps:
- Log in to the MAGIP site.
- Navigate to the editing interface of your member profile: View Profile>Edit Profile.
- Complete your member profile with as much detail as possible. Pay particular attention to setting Skills check boxes that represent areas that you can offer advice either with Peer-to-Peer networking or in a Mentor-to-Mentee relationship. Use the Bio text box to further describe the kind of work you do. The content of the Bio text box is text searchable by members.
- In the Skills section, set the "Am I currently a Mentor?" field to Yes if you are already mentoring. Set the "Am I available as a Mentor?" field to Yes if you are available to assist. This second field enables others to find you during searches for a mentor or for Peer-to-Peer assistance.
- Read the Mentoring Topics, Mentoring Code of Ethics, the MAGIP Mentoring Disclaimer pages.
- When a member contacts you, consider if this person’s interests, skills, location, etc. are a good match for you as a mentor. If you are unavailable or you don’t think it’s a good fit, please communicate this to the member.
- If you would like to mentor this person:
A. Confirm on the MAGIP website that this person is an active MAGIP member by searching for him or her in the member directory. If the applicant is not a member, then please inform him or her that membership in MAGIP is required.
B. If this person is a member, suggest that he or she contact you to set up an initial conversation and begin the rapport. If helpful, see the Getting Started page for guidance.
7. Update your availability as a mentor on your profile Skills section if it changes.
8. Maintain your MAGIP membership.
9. Provide feedback about the MAGIP GIS Mentoring program.
Feedback Survey
Mentoring Code of Ethics
Getting Started
Mentoring Topics
MAGIP FAQs
MAGIP's WebEx virtual meeting account
Join.Me (free screen sharing)
Skype (free video calling and conference calls)
GISCI Mentoring program
Thoughts on Hiring Recent Grads with GIS Coursework
Competencies: Ideal Student Outcomes from an Intro to GIS or Remote Sensing Course
