 I'm really excited to introduce my first speaker. I've actually seen her speak at War Camp US. She is a developer advocate over at Pantheon. And speaking about something that's really, she's really passionate about, that's developing the culture of mentorship. So I will pass the mic over, pass the crystal. Thank you. Glad you're in here. So we've got mentorship today. It's something that gets me right here in my heart. It's something that any of you all have questions after like long talk about it. My story of mentorship actually started with girl development. Has anyone heard of girl development? So it's a nationwide nonprofit organization that teaches women to go. The girl part is a little bit misleading. But they teach women to code. And I moved to the Twin Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota five years ago. And the first thing I did when I moved there is that I decided I wanted to get involved with a local tech team. I lived in a small town before that in Morgan, Minnesota. There was nothing out there. There was nobody to talk to. There was nobody to be able to collaborate with. And I worked with them. So in doing that, I found girl development. They had a meet a group in Minneapolis. And they were teaching one of their first classes, which was like an introduction to HTML and CSS. And they had a call for TAs. And so I was like, hey, I can totally help. I can answer what I went and I TA. And the chapter was afterwards like, you were amazing. Can you please teach additional classes? And additional curriculums that broke up. We had a very CSS-focused class. We did a website-concept class that talked a lot like FTP and Git and servers and all the things you need to know to get your website online. And then also top WordPress class, which is really exciting because I love WordPress. And it really kind of ignited this fire in me of the fact that I loved teaching people to code. We all know stuff. We know something. It might not be coding. It might not be CSS. Whatever it is that you know, someone else wants to know what you know and what you share with them. So that's where I started. So a little bit more about me. They had mentioned sponsors and speakers cross over. I am that test case for sure. I'm a developer advocate at Pantheon. My background has been a developer for like, I would say over 10 years now. Started in Jumla, did some Drupal, did a lot of WordPress, still fully available to kind of cross over between all of those CMSs. Again, I started with a developer in Minneapolis. I am the founder of an organization called Upscoken Women. If you are a woman in tech and you want to get into all this public speaking, that's where you should definitely go. Also, the organizer for Camp in Minneapolis. So this has some information about me. I'll have my slides available. I actually share them on Twitter. As you're watching the talk, if something really hits home with you, I would love to be sharing on social media. And then they have an official hashtag of WCF. It really was because I feel very passionately about the fact that new developers who come out of code schools or who come out of college or any other type of education really struggle with getting their first job. And that's really what I wanted to like hit home with this talk and then how we can really help to change a lot of those things. So some little stats here. So the job outlook, in 2016, there was 162,000 total jobs in development in general. And in 2026, it's expected to grow to 188,000 jobs. That's a really large increase. But the problem with that is that, yes, that's great. Tech is growing. That's awesome. It's a good industry. But we're going to lose about 10% of our developers. They're going to retire over the next 10 years. On average, developers actually tend to retire at about the age of like 55. So we lose those extra 10 or 15 years that other industries might still have different candidates in. So we've got this increase. We're also going to have this really large block as well. So we really need to put a lot of focus on training new developers and bringing them into fields and teaching them things that we know. So for all of you who have a phone or who have a computer, if you go to what's on your computer and you enter in the event code of WCSTAT, this will come up in there. But I wanted to show you it now because there's going to be a couple of questions on there that I'm going to ask you. I want to get you all involved. And then there's also an area for you to ask me questions. So if you have this topic, I'll allow you to just put your questions in there. And then I can go through and answer them. And we should have a little conversation about that. So I'll leave this up for just a minute or two while you guys can come on to it. I'll have this again later right before we do the questions. So smart information in doing this. So I met very young new developers that come out of a coding school in Minneapolis. And in doing that, I just told you like I was very passionate about getting these people jobs because they can't find jobs. And so I started looking through job descriptions. What does an actual junior web developer look like? What should they know? What kind of experience are people asking for? Like where can I help them find these jobs for them to get started? And it was actually really heartbreaking. In my mind, if I see a junior web developer role, that means you don't know what you're doing, right? Junior to me is entry level. You've maybe learned something so that you're qualified enough to be a web developer, but nothing that I would feel like would be a quantitative experience. So going through that, in the junior web developer title, 60% of them required at least two years of experience. Like if you're a junior, we have two years of experience. People are gonna sustain you out like anyone who's a developer but has two plus years of experience is more than proficient to take a middle type of a role in my opinion. Things change, and if you've been a developer for two years, you've been through all of the recent changes. You probably know React better than I do because you know all of these new things that have been coming out. 18% of them required 20% of experience. I think that's fair. If the other number wasn't so large, that would be okay. And only 22% of them required no actual experience. Which is ridiculous in my mind. And you don't feel 100% comfortable with the things that you've learned. Surely you've learned, you've passed your test, you've gotten through, you've graduated. Like how do you feel comfortable applying for a job that requires experience? I personally wouldn't, and I think that I would feel defeated. I wouldn't know how to move forward. So here's kind of an example, job description that I found. I stripped out all of the company information to just keep it very neutral. The things that they want people to know, like the distributed version of control within a team. It took me like a year to feel super comfortable to get in a team environment where I had a purge complex and other issues, but I could resolve those. That's a huge thing, it's a huge hurdle to go over. They want you to be like, to know the emphasis of designs, but they also want you to know the latest job description works. They're basically asking for someone who's been in the industry for multiple years, but they want to pay you $40,000 a year. It's just not fair. But for me, I want to be the change that I wish to see. So be the change that you wish to see in the world. So let's all change that. We can all do things to help mentor them, help them, help get them more comfortable. Also help them read job descriptions, like read between the lines if you've got some of it, but not the other ones, encourage them to be able to move forward and still do these things and still apply. So I break this down into two sections. The first section is if you are in an organization, if you want a company, you're a manager, if you work in a company and want your company to get involved, it's going to be some tips for that organization on how to kind of get started. And the second half is if you're just an employee, if you're a developer, whatever you are, it's going to be more difficult for you personally to get involved and get started in mentorship. So this first section of what organizations apply to should hire people. Team morale. So mentoring is rewarding and good for team morale. If someone teaches someone something else, the person who learned it feels accomplished and the person who taught it feels like, wow, I totally just did something good. I didn't even realize how good it was, but now I'm feeling it. And that just makes your team all around, just happier and feeling more accomplished, which is really rewarding. It is a lot easier to find someone who matches your company culture and maybe a personality type that you were looking for and then teach them the skills, rather than try to find someone who matches all of that plus has the skills. I didn't even hire them for months, maybe even years if you're looking for a really expertise type of a situation. So just hire good people and give them the skills that they need to be successful. Caction is infectious. So this is also like the team morale one. As you can tell right now, I am very passionate about this and I know that the rest of you are feeling this. And I've been there. I have watched others leaders that are super passionate about something. And then I first learned like, oh, that's like, I'm feeling not like I understand that. And it works the same way in your team. If you have someone who comes in and they're super passionate and they're really excited to teach to them or maybe they're really excited to learn. Junior developers are probably one of the most passionate people I've seen in my life. They've got their schooling or they've decided this is something they wanna do and they just wanna learn. They're a sponge. They're ready to soak up everything and they're happy to do so. And that's gonna roll off of everyone else that they're around. I think all of you in the team, I'm sure all of you have felt it. I was on a team for another like, working on the same type of projects for like two years. We just kind of had the same flow. None of us are really changing anything different except for like, maybe industry standards coming up with some updates, things like that. But really I have no new ideas. We brought in a new employee and even though this new employee wasn't a junior developer, there's still someone new from the outside world. And he had different ideas and different visions. So bringing in junior developers seem to be completely different than that. It's gonna be even more accelerated than that. They're gonna come in and not have a lot of industry expertise. So they're gonna have information or things that they've seen from the outside. So they're gonna be very comparable to maybe your clients or other users but have some awesome knowledge about what you're trying to accomplish. So they're a very good person to come in and be able to give you some. All right, so we've heard some reasons why. Let's talk about how you can get started. So I feel like I've already really put the pressure on on job description. As a company, you are the one responsible for those job descriptions. Making sure that they actually list the things that you've got in that future employee. Has anyone seen a job description? And maybe if you know what that's talking people will understand this, but. A job description where it says, we're looking for HTML, CSS, job description, Java. Does anyone see that word? Yeah, so the laughing point if you're unaware is that Java is completely different than JavaScript. Java is a back end coding language that requires more complicated setup than just running in the browser. And so when I see those job descriptions it just means we laugh. Who's writing these? Where are they getting this information? So when you create a job description have the people that are going to work with this person review that. Allow them to contribute to what you really actually need as a team. And also if you're willing to hire junior developers don't put too much of an experience on there. You're going to just allow them to feel defeated. Put on there that you're looking for someone passionate and willing to learn. And don't even put experience or maybe put some of the coding things we want you to have dabbled in this. We feel passionate about you having these subsets of personality skills. Whatever is important to you make sure that you write it so that they feel welcomed and that they want to apply and feel like they are qualified to apply for that job. Create strategic partnerships. And share experience developers with new developers that share goals and code of interest. So if you have a smaller company you're obviously just going to pair people together that it makes sense. But if you have a larger company find people that maybe have some type of shared interest. Maybe there's people that both like to go blacking or that both love dogs. I love dogs so much that if I find someone else who loves a dog that I'm like oh you're my US right. Like find a way for them to relate to each other and have that partnership. That they want to talk to them so that they become friends.