Social Network Asks Whether You Are a Mentor or a Mentee

With Social Networks popping out like mushrooms after a mild May rain, this is the one that is the most business oriented that I've seen coming out in the past two months, except for Yahoo!'s Kickstart. The iMantri comes to embrace the National Mentoring Month in the United States, something I myself have never ever heard anything about, but I guess you have to be in certain circles to have access to that kind of information.

The main focus of this network is on "goals" and "competencies", in the attempt to match the mentors available to the mentees in search for directions and knowledge. The website is not particularly well designed and is pretty text heavy, while the colors are far from friendly, but the idea should be enough to pull the site onto an ascending path in the future, if it is well executed.

You have to enlist yourself as a mentor or as a mentee, like I said, and provide or require help for any need imaginable, from better time management to project management. It puzzles me that there are people asking for help on topics that have been covered very well by books, but I guess that the human factor is not negligible, when asking for help, and that personal experience might spark that idea which will make the difference when handling the respective situation.

In case you don't want to go through the services matching up the two categories of users, there's also a page that allows you to do this on your own, by checking out the other's profile. Apart from the relevant skills and needs displayed on the profiles, if I reached the topic, the site also provides survey tools for ID-ing the competencies that a particular mentor could help a mentee strengthen, but at the same time the profiles are public, you don't even need to sign in to see them. So, be careful with the information you put in there!