Mentorship is crucial, but none more so than for many graduates who exit into the real world looking for jobs and need support systems to help them find their calling. The problem is that many existing mentorship networks aren’t geared towards helping graduates. That’s where VineUp.com comes in: it helps organizations build a complete online mentoring community of their own.
VineUp.com works through the idea of “Pods”, each of which acts as a standalone ecosystem built around the mentoring needs of an organization. For example, it allows universities to help students build a network of mentors by the time they graduate, through a combination of their alumni network and companies giving back to local universities in the form of online mentoring through various employees. This way, the university can help match alumni with current students, and allow internal HR teams to develop their talent management and succession planning through mentorship. But open Pods also allows members to mentor beyond their immediate network, so that mentors can choose to reach beyond their own Pods and add value to other Pods.
Founded in March 2012 by Luke Deering and Chris Dowdeswell, VineUp.com started as a dream to build a free online community designed to foster entrepreneurship through mentoring, acting as a feeder system for entrepreneurs to funnel skilled individuals, information and resources for other entrepreneurs. But as the founders developed the product, they realized found another potential gap: they realized there were graduates leaving university with skills but don’t have a network of mentors.
“The lack of a support system… (means) way too many graduates have not found their true calling and have left university to become unemployed or being unemployed,” says Luke Deering, CEO of VineUp.com.
We’re hoping that VineUp.com is set to help more mentors play a huge role in shaping the lives, careers and destinies of future change makers in this world.
