 Hello folks, how are you? We are happy to see you here, and we're happy to be here. We're in a little hard to start as you see because of some technical problems, and we have two few time And we can talk about monitoring forever But here we are, and yeah My name is Maria Totova, and I live and work in Poggi Poggi area. I work as the Drupal developer through Interactive It's a leading marketing agency in Germany. I'm also a board member of Drupal Poggi area That's our local association, and during my free time I volunteer as a mentor Community leader instructor at Colling Girls. I'm also founder co-founder of Drupal Girls You probably have heard about them. You can find some stickers on the first chairs there if you want to Hello, my name is Todor Nikolov, and I'm from Klaudeburg area. I've been working with Drupal for two years now I'm a university student, and I work at Tech Family Ventures And I'm also a mentor at Colling Girls. So let's start The first question is what does mentoring mean? Well, we all know that Mentoring is typically defined as a professional relationship with a more experienced developer specialist Provides some help or assistance to another person in developing better skills and knowledge, but is it all? Actually, it's not, and there are a lot more aspects to mentoring than only training And of course, the more the main focus is gaining new experience, broadening your expertise In general, people are quite capable of learning from their own rights But no one can replace the presence of a mentor, of a person who can give advice at the right moment Who can encourage you when you feel blue, who can motivate you to keep fighting and guide you when you get lost Or sometimes even knowing that there is someone out there who believes in you can be all the support needed The mentor-mainty relationship is indeed a special bond. It's a two ways in terms that it requires communication and developing skills and everyone involved shares ideas and experience The mentors also widen their field of expertise. It's not only about mentees, right? We know that the best way to learn is to teach The relationship should be open and open and honest in all ways. I Have had three mentors in my life and they are my friends forever. I owe them a lot So it's always good to have a mentor And in fact, mentors do have mentors. Everybody needs to recognize that We can all learn and benefit from each other. This is the most natural thing and can change our life for real So I believe we are already getting there, but why is mentoring so important? Mentoring is important because it's an activity which has multiple benefits for everyone. Let's check them out The mentee should be the primary focus of this relationship Having a mentor can help you understand everything faster It gives you the benefit of having someone you can rely on when you need help Mentors can also help motivate you by supporting you in solving harder problems Or provide you with a different perspective you haven't talked about. You always have someone you can count on that makes learning easier Being a mentor yourself has benefits as well By teaching and supporting someone you also enhance your own skills and knowledge It's a good way to learn new stuff or practice the basics You also get to see a different perspective to see how a beginner will tackle a problem and you might learn something new from that Mentoring helps you improve your communication and leadership skills because you need both of them in order to be able to properly help your mentee You are doing something good and beneficial for others and they're giving back to the community by increasing its numbers If your employees are mentors your business can benefit as well if colleagues are mentoring each other This can raise the overall performance and productivity Everyone Shares their knowledge and experience if your company mentors students or Interns this can increase brand recognition people notice the company more often You raise the reputation and it's an easy way to attract potential future employees of the company There is something in for the community as well Mentoring helps increase the number of people interested in joining the community in our case with Drupal mentoring as potential contributors and promotes Drupal as a technology if you're fortunate enough to have a great mentor You're more like it to become successful at an early age. For example Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg That's the case with them Mentoring builds new perspectives and widens the horizons of both the mentor and the mentee But how to be a good mentor? It's a great question indeed The very first thing you need to do is to actually step out of your comfort zone and try being a mentor Don't underestimate your skills and don't be shy to try There is a big problem with mentors and a lot of people especially women have never had a mentor in their professional life It's a total waste of talent. I'm sure you all agree and After all the most difficult thing is to start right so just step in and try on your own You know about a poster syndrome, right? That last feeling that makes us question our skills our knowledge and can make us stay in the corner Stay behind the stage never try to make anything. But in fact all of you can All of you know a lot and enough to spread or to share with the rest so Do you just need we all just need to accept that life is just too short to learn it all and Whatever, you know, you can share it no one knows everything but nobody expects you to know everything and Even your mentee can work together in an honest way Period type is something very important. You don't need to have the traditional image of a teacher or instructor In fact, the mentor-mentee relationship can be quite personal as well it should be only honest and you as a mentor have to discover the needs of your mentee and You need to have an individual approach which means that if you have several mentees at the same time you should consider their interest their Field of expertise what they can improve where they have to work more and so on and you can need You should focus on this also, you should respect things like Racial political gender differences things like that and you should respect them of course in In general, you should show your good side. You should be open and honest You should build a relationship with your mentee That is based on trust and to learn to respond to his or her needs But sometimes you also need to show your bad side Because you don't have to do everything Instead of your mentee on the contrary you need to work away step away and let them work independently in order to provide the best out of them You should show them that different options Exist and they are the ones who have to choose the right one or just to make a decision you need to require more and In this way you'll get the most out of your mentees of course and Not to forget that sometimes we have to give some constructive feedback Sometimes we need to keep the mentee on the ground And in this process as we already said we all improve ourselves We should spend some time as well to prepare for our Mutual work with our mentee. There are topics that we need to cover There are some materials that you can provide to them so to make this process easier But in fact you should also allow yourself to learn from your mentee We do this all the time and we learn a lot even from our students high school university It doesn't matter everyone knows something that the other doesn't and that's the beauty behind mentoring Okay, we are already Getting there, but how do we do it? So after telling you about why you should consider mentoring and how to improve it We would like to share with you how we are actually doing mentoring so you can get an idea of how to do it yourself There are many ways to start mentoring and helping people one of them is organizing different events like meetups workshops courses and camps we as part of coding girls in our local Drupal community have organized many events One of the things we do is to provide access to all of them for free that way more people will be able to Come and learn something new Now in this picture you can see me as a mentee on a coding girls event Which Maria organized as it was for Drupal and several months later You can see me as the mentor of my own course Now There are some more pictures of courses workshops and events we have organized This next one is from a HTML CSS course and it's right after the students graduated We also included providing certificates to our mentees so they can feel appreciation from their work This is an event where coding girls participated. It was at the international girls in ICT day And that picture is from a local Drupal camp at Plovdiv, which we organized Another thing we do is to take university students as interns It's a good way for them to learn about Drupal and a good way for us to find potential new colleagues And this is a picture from one of the one of our student groups at Plovdiv Mentoring doesn't always need to be between a beginner and an expert two people with similar level can also change knowledge No matter what you can always learn something new from everyone So we have mentoring at the office as well Let's summarize all we have discussed today Yes In short, good and productive mentoring relationship with the right person Provides huge benefits for both sides. I'm sure you all agree on that Mentors and mentees improve their knowledge their performance They they do this much better that much faster than they would otherwise do so Not to mention how much fun it is for both sides. It is definitely a time well spent for both parties How do we know that the answer is simple by stepping up and being mentors One of the best schools out there belongs to John Crosby and it says mentoring is a brain to pick I'm here to listen and a bush in the right direction. And I think we can both agree on that Thank you. And don't forget to show your appreciation towards your mentors And of course try it on your own spread some people and magic around One of the best ways to start is to step out of your comfort zone and try it on your own Join the community contribution day and find a mentor or become one yourself Appreciate your feedback. And now is your time for your question We love discussion. So please Okay Yeah, we organize events that are especially organized and announced as events for ladies and Yeah, some women who do need this they have a little push or to feel a little support but it works and if we have like 1520 first people at each event that we organize we have also workshops we present Notes like we start with front-end development because it's easy for them to start What was your concrete approach? Have you put flyers to your university in Bulgaria? Yeah, we mainly use Facebook to advertise our events With coding girls initiative, but also we work at the university where we teach students During their internship programs and that they come also to our company This is also a good way to approach more women because in Bulgaria. There are a lot of girls who study science in general and Bulgaria is on the top of the list of countries with women working in the IT field. So Actually, there's interest they just need some support Can I add as well? Like Everywhere we we visit or speak somewhere or we introduce our company somewhere. We also introduce coding girls as well So this is a way to promote it and one thing we strive to do is to make sure that everyone is welcome So so they feel welcome And where is the best place to find a mentee if I want to be a mentor for example For example, I never had some such experience, but if I feel that I can One of the best ways is actually opportunities like this one here. You can meet a lot of Drupal people there guys and girls who have never tried Drupal before even made they may not be Technical technical person, but yeah, just meet people as them If you wish we can we are always looking for mantras. Yes, and I can't talk about this later But if you ask, I'm sure there will be a lot of people who are ready And to find mentor I could add to this as well now also universities or Students like in schools are a really good approach as well Because people there always need someone to mentor them So if you're part of a company, you can you can always ask to take students as mentees Other questions Yeah I need you to repeat it, please so The question is what percentage of the students successfully start jobs at as Drupal developers and We actually don't have exact numbers on that and I'm I think so far only few of them have started so interested big but in our case We're from Bulgaria and in our specific case there wasn't really an opening really from them So they weren't happy with that Yes, this is absolutely one of the problems So everybody speaks how the Drupal community needs more young power, right and students and people working So that not only the same phases come to the events again and again But actually the interest there is a big interest towards Drupal and I have no problem to motivate my students And make them start working with Drupal However, we have problem with the business with the companies because most companies are looking for guess what senior developers But somebody needs to build these senior developers so here we should work more closely with the business and We need some support so that those young specialists that just have got graduated can start working and gain more practice But in general this is If that's all we will finish now and let our colleague to join you and present his session and if you have more questions So I want to speak with us. We are here the next day. So just reach out to us. Thanks. Thank you Okay