With your graduation in mind a lot of questions about a potential future job arise. How to find the best job and how do you know what’s the best job for you? What qualities are businesses looking for and how can you best present yourself? It would be ideal to have someone assist you that already went through this process. A person to ask all your questions to in person instead of reading blogs on the Internet, hoping you will find the right answers. But how do you find that person?
There is nowadays a company that can help you find such a mentor, who will guide you through this exiting journey of getting your first job. Dwillo provides online mentor communities, which exist out of students and young professionals. Dwillo facilitates the relations between these groups and tries to help between finding the perfect match. A mentor (which could be a young professional in my case) can help mentees (which would then be me) in making difficult choices related to career and personal development. Exactly the person I am looking for!
Dwillo, (co-) founded by a RSM alumnus in 2012, is an online platform that allows students, professionals and entrepreneurs to connect in a mentor relation. By providing online mentor communities for universities, associations and enterprises they make it possible for people to connect. Dwillo provides a platform, which creates value through co-creation of mentors and mentees. Dwillo won several competitions such as the RSM I WILL Award and the Philips Innovation Award.
Some will be skeptical about the platform, as they might say you could easily ask someone that is close by (relatives, friends, classmates), but Dwillo markets itself with the fact that it saves time, engages users and their platform has a low organizational risk. Who actually uses Dwillo and whom can I find on the platform? As a student from Rotterdam School of Management, I can contact (experienced) alumni to find a mentor. But it also works the other way around, because as an experienced student (I think I can call myself that after living and studying almost 6 years in Rotterdam now), I can choose to also be a mentor for young students and future students to help them in return. The intrinsic satisfaction of helping young students, a rewarding volunteering experience and enhancing leadership and coaching skills are benefits that arise from mentoring (other) students.
Dwillo will only continue to exist if enough students are looking for a mentor and enough young professionals want to mentor students. Value is therefore created if the online platform is used and, according to Grönroos and Voima (2013), the customer’s well being increases through the process. The students and young professionals co-create value for each other, and Dwillo assists them in this process.
Unfortunately I am too late to register for the spring edition, but I will definitely register myself when the registration procedure is open again! Be it a mentor or a mentee, I definitely want to contribute to this beautiful volunteering experience provided by Dwillo.
Grönroos, C., & Voima, P. (2013). Critical service logic: making sense of value creation and co-creation. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 41(2), 133-150
Consumer Value Creation 