Mentoring is essential in developing well-rounded, professional, and competent future leaders and helps Total Force Airmen and Guardians maximize their full potential.

The mentoring program is designed to help Airmen discover their strengths while achieving their full potential through a structured, trusted mentoring relationship.  Effective mentorship is a stewardship responsibility that provides:

• a climate of inclusion for fostering the diverse strengths and perspectives of all Airmen
• opportunity to unlock the innovative potential for personal and professional development
• a combination of formal and informal strategies for building strong mentoring relationships.

National Mentoring Month was started in 2002 and was spearheaded by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Corporation for National and Community Service. It is an annual, high-profile campaign to bring national attention to the value of mentoring and to stimulate organizations to integrate effective mentoring strategies and processes into their initiatives.

• Promote the transformative power of mentorship
• Draw attention to the need for volunteer mentors
• Motivate Airmen and Guardians to use the mentoring capabilities of MyVECTOR
• Express appreciation for those who devote their time to provide effective mentoring
• Encourage leaders and organizations to engage in quality mentoring for all Airmen and Guardians (military and civilian)
• Encourage mentees to seek mentors
• Encourage leaders to become mentors

Mentors should be diligent in their role and share knowledge, experiences and advice in helping mentees achieve their career and personal goals. Mentors help mentees construct goals that become part of the roadmap for career development. Mentors ask many questions and spend time hearing the response of mentees to use in future career vectors. Mentors serve as advisors, advocates and facilitators.

Mentees should be proactive about their personal and professional development by supporting mentors in creating an appropriate environment for growth opportunities.  They should work with their mentors in constructing personal developmental plans that are challenging and achievable. Resources in AFH 36-2643, Air Force Mentoring Program, and on MyVECTOR may be used.

Trust is built into a mentoring relationship by being open, honest, respectful and accountable.

Mentoring and coaching complement each other. A mentor is a subject matter expert who provides the mentee with guidance, advice, and past experience. In contrast, a coach partners with and empowers their members to develop their own courses of action and solutions to problems.

While a mentor and a coach both have different attributes, they are both equally valuable.

MyVECTOR is an enterprise solution supporting career development and management across the DAF. It supports individual Airmen and Guardians, career field managers and development teams. Many Airmen and Guardians already have mentors outside of MyVECTOR.  For those who do not, the MyVECTOR Mentoring platform allows Airmen and Guardians to request a mentor or be matched with a mentor. The mentor can view the mentee’s developmental progress to provide feedback and recommendations. Resources also are located in MyVECTOR.

No, many Airmen and Guardians have established mentoring relationships developed outside of MyVECTOR.  However, all Airmen and Guardians can benefit from the talent management functionalities of MyVECTOR to include the mentoring functionality.

The mentoring plan serves as a roadmap for achieving mentee’s goals and facilitating mentoring expectations. It also can become a communication tool for discussions between the mentors and mentees.

Racial and ethnicity information is personal information, it is up to each individual member to determine if they would like that information shared in MyVECTOR.

Mentor/mentee relationships and their communication are confidential in MyVECTOR.

It is not a requirement to use MyVECTOR to communicate with your mentor.  It’s just an option available to those using MyVECTOR.

The Air Force completely redesigned the Mentoring platform in MyVECTOR based on user feedback. New features include:

• Ability to self-identify as someone seeking a mentor or someone who wants to be a mentor
• Track the status of their mentoring requests
• Updated Resources page
• Enhanced messaging capability that allows users to send messages to mentors
• Additional search filters: (ethnicity, race, disability, Exceptional Family Members Program (EFMP), MAJCOM, organizations, and ranks)
• Ability for mentees to share documents with mentor
• Sister Service mentor/mentee enabled capability
• Career Field Manger ability to assign mentors to mentees (Spring 2022)

Due to the recent MyVECTOR Mentoring update, individual users must log into MyVector Mentoring and update their profile, to include self-identifying preferred attributes before mentees can find a mentor with those attributes. That data is masked until the user self-identifies. As more mentors update their profiles, more mentors with specific attributes will show up in the mentee’s search results.

MyVECTOR Mentoring is a one-stop-shop for pairing mentors with mentees. With the newest updates, mentors and mentees can chat and mentees can share documents with their mentors.  Also, mentees have the ability to reach beyond their organization, base, or even MAJCOM to seek out a mentor. The diverse pool of mentors ensures that every mentee has the ability to find the right mentor for them.

At this point, MyVECTOR Mentoring does not have a virtual meeting capability; however, this is our desired future state.  On the other hand, this doesn’t stop you from using other mobile apps for your mentoring session.

MyVECTOR Mentoring has a tab whereby the mentee can fill out focus areas, a bullet tracker, and experience. In addition, the mentee can add their long-term career goals and short-term objectives. There is even a section for the mentee’s career brief. The mentor and mentee can work together to fill out the mentoring expectations tab and both the mentor and mentee can review, revisit, and do a deep dive before and during each mentoring session.