By Clarice Fu
Young adults today crave mentorship[1, 2]. Born between 1980 and 2000, Millenials/Generation Yers seek mentors that can support their personal growth and help them navigate their career path. Our Gen Y Rover Scouts are no exception.
Our Rover Crew stands by the premise that our Rover Scouts would develop leadership skills through experiential learning. In our earlier years, we exposed ourselves to many, many projects. Our activities mostly consisted of council and area service endeavors – ranging from helping groups with leader shortages, to running camps, to helping organize larger-scale events such as the 2007 Centennial Scouters’ Conference.
We soon noticed that something was missing from our learning experience. Indeed, we gained valuable hands-on-experience, but we found the experience incomplete when we simply dived into project after project. I called this “learning by osmosis”, and the rate of osmosis was much too slow. We asked ourselves:
- What can we do to enhance our learning?
- How can we encourage a more deliberate focus on learning from our experiences?
- How can we create more opportunities to reflect and think about our personal development?
The answer was clear and unanimous – we wanted mentorship. We wanted guidance in goal setting and overcoming challenges, and we wanted candid catalytic feedback. We also wanted advice from someone who was older and wiser, and someone who can hold us accountable to our commitments.
Hence, mentoring was born in our Rover Crew. Since then, we’ve witnessed time and time again the positive impacts of effective mentoring. We’ve seen results – Rover Scouts doing better in school, becoming better public speakers, growing into confident individuals, and getting the jobs that they want. We know that our Rover Scouts value mentorship because they stay in our Rover Crew as advisors after they age out.
The evolution of our mentor program exemplifies our Rover Crew’s belief that we must stay relevant to the needs of youth today. We know that this is the key to attracting and retaining members, the key to growing our Scout Group – and to growing Scouts Canada.
Stay tuned for Clarice’s next articles on “The Pillars of Mentoring at 180th (Part 1): The Roles and Aims of our mentors”
References:
1. “Mentoring Millennials,” Harvard Business Review, accessed December 8, 2013, https://www.shrm.org/Conferences/StudentConferences/Documents/Generations%20at%20Work%20Annual%202011/Mentoring%20Millenials.pdf
2. “Generation Y seeks job flexibility and mentorship,” Royal Roads University, accessed December 8, 2013, http://www.royalroads.ca/news-media/generation-y-seeks-job-flexibility-and-mentorship