OK, let me go ahead and get started here. Welcome everybody and thank you for attending my talk today and thank you to the Women Tech Global Conference for having me. I'm Kan Fu.I am a five G signal processing engineering manager at Intel and I'm delighted to be here today to be talking about building effective mentorship programs. Mentorship is particularly important to me because I've had a tremendously um It's been tremendously helpful for my career growth.

I've been fortunate to have had numerous opportunities to participate in mentorship programs and to learn from a number of mentors and mentees. So today, I wanted to share some of what I've learned about mentorship so that others can also benefit from the power of mentoring.

So I wanted to start today with a quote about mentoring. Mentoring is a brain to pick an ear to listen and a push in the right direction. And I really like this quote because I feel that it captures a lot of the essence of mentoring. The mentor is there to provide advice and feedback and encouragement and then it's up to the mentee to put in the hard work and to leverage those learnings in their own career journey. And before I discuss some of the tips for building effective mentorship programs, I wanted to provide some motivation for why these programs can be beneficial. Mentorship is a important tool to help build talent pipelines and to help those in the STEM field to stay in it and to grow their careers. Mentorship can be helpful for everybody but it can be particularly beneficial for women in other underrepresented communities in STEM. And since we're at a women's conference today, I wanted to focus on the statistics. So some of the statistics that we have for women in STEM. So looking at the college women in STEM programs before they graduate, 32% will have left the STEM fields. By the time they hit graduation, only 20% of the bachelor's degrees in engineering are awarded to women. And then looking 20 years out after graduation, only 30% of those women will still be practicing in engineering occupations.

And research has shown that part of the reason for this high attrition is due to women feeling a lack of support and training, development opportunities and career progression. And so this is where mentorship can help, can help them to get the support that they need to stay into STEM and to grow their careers and to progress in their career journey. Here at Intel, we are committed to raising the bar for ourselves and evolving our corporate responsibility strategy. To increase the scale of our work and uh to create a more responsible, inclusive and sustainable world enabled through technology and our collective actions. As part of our commitment, we have what we call our rise. 2030 goals and diversity and inclusion are one of the important parts of that of, of those goals. I've included a few of those key diversity and inclusive inclusion goals here. So by 2030 we aim to double the number of women in underrepresented minorities and senior leadership roles and to achieve greater than 40% representation of women in technical positions. We're working actively to embed inclusive leadership practices and accountability in our culture. And part of that is mentorship programs.

As I was mentioning, mentoring programs are powerful tools for promoting inclusion and career development, particularly for women and other underrepresented groups in stem those who may struggle more with feeling that they don't belong or struggle with confidence or with other challenges of being in the minority.

So mentorship can help them to get the support that they need to stay into stem and to grow their careers. I've provided here some of the more specific uh specific benefits of mentoring. So for mentees, they can get from their mentors, not only experienced advice, but also guidance about how to navigate the corporate world and to grow their careers. And they can also get opportunities to brainstorm with their mentors as they're navigating their own career path for both mentors and mentees. It's also a great opportunity to grow their networks. When we talk about mentorship, we often focus on the benefits for mentees. But there's actually a lot of benefits for mentors as well. Mentors can grow their leadership skills and broaden their perspectives. And there's also a lot of mentors who report increased job satisfaction after participating in mentorship programs. So there are a lot of great benefits to mentorship that many employees are not aware of what mentoring involves. They may have heard of it. They don't really know what it means or what benefits it provides and they may not know how to get involved. And so that's where mentorship programs can help. They can provide that structure so that you can get more employees involved and and allow them to tap into the power of mentoring, mentorship programs can take place at any level of your organization and beyond.

I provided here just a few examples of some of the mentoring programs that we have within the organization. I'm part of at Intel, the next generation and Standards group at my own team level. I have about a dozen engineers and I've set up mentoring partnerships between them at the organizational level of the next generation standards group. We have mentoring initiatives for our women in the organization and we've also gone beyond our organization and helped to establish an outreach program in collaboration with a nonprofit and academic institutions to mentor college women in STEM programs. And this program has been a tremendous success and we've, we've structured it around monthly events with mentoring sessions as well as educational programming. We've also gotten the students involved in the planning and running of the events. This helps us to make sure that our content is relevant to the student participants and also gives those students opportunities to grow their leadership as well. Mentorship programs can have a wide variety of success rates. So it's important to think ahead about how you can make these programs more successful. So I'm providing here a few of the lessons and tips that we've learned through our own mentorship programs. I'll be focusing today on four main topics. One is training for your mentors and mentees.

Two is encouraging your mentees to drive their, their relationship. Three is being thoughtful about your mentor and mentee matching and four being proactive about recruiting and I'll talk about each one of these in a little bit more detail. Oops. And so the first tip here is that training is critical. The participants may not be familiar with mentoring relationships and how to establish and foster effective partnerships. So it's critical to provide that guidance to the mentors and mentees and I've provided here a snippet of some of the guidance that we provide to our mentors and mentees. One of the key points that we emphasize is that the more thought and effort that they invest, the more benefits they will reap some of the specific guidance that we do provide them is to work together with the mentor and mentee partners to clarify their expectations. So what are the mentorship goals? What is the confidentiality expectations? If you establish that confidentiality expectation, then they will be more willing to have those open discussions that are more meaningful in terms of logistics. It's helpful to set up regular meetings, for example, half an hour or an hour every 2 to 4 weeks, something like that without having that regular structure. Uh then um those, those meetings may not happen.

So if you set up those regular times, it makes it more likely that those discussions will be happening. It's also helpful to define ahead of time the partnership length. So for example, you might say will be for the next six months or next one year and you can always re evaluate as needed. But by having a time bound partnership, then you will encourage your mentors and mentees to be more thoughtful about how they're going to best make use of that time that they have together for the mentees. It's important for them to help their mentor, help them. So if they can be more specific about what support they need and what their goals are, then that will make it easier for the mentors to help them. And the last couple tips that we provide here is just for them to respect each other's time. And to get to know each other. The other piece of training is providing resources to the mentors and mentees. There are a lot of common topics that come up in mentorship, for example, communication, skills, strategic thinking, influencing and so on. And there's also a lot of great material out there. So it's helpful to collect that information for your mentors and mentees.

So they can use that as a starting point for their discussions And it can also make it easier and more comfortable for your mentors to provide advice to your mentees. The second tip here is to let your mentees drive the relationship. Mentorship. Partnerships tend to be more effective when the mentees are driving because they can make it more meaningful to them. So what does it mean for the mentees to drive the relationship? Well, that means the mentees are driving the direction of the discussions they're defining and communicating their goals.

And while they're doing that, they're considering both technical and soft skills and then between meetings, they're doing their homework, they're coming prepared with an agenda and with questions and the mentors can support them by listening, actively and encouraging and inspiring their mentees.

Uh But it's also important for them to challenge their mentees beyond their comfort zones because that is where a lot of the growth happens. And lastly, the mentors will do a lot of sharing of their experiences and, and this is one of the key pieces for how the mentees will learn from the mentors. The third tip here is to thoughtfully match your mentors and mentees. And this will look different depending on the size of your program. So for example, at a team level, you likely know your team very well. So you can leverage those insights you have into your team members to thoughtfully match your mentors and mentees at an organizational level.

It can be helpful to meet with the mentees one on one to understand their goals and then find appropriate mentors for them as the program, excuse me, as the program gets larger. For example, for outreach programs, you may be less familiar with the participants. So in that case, we found it helpful for the mentors to provide bios to the mentees and to also provide opportunities for the mentors and mentees to talk for a few minutes and then to collect preferences from the mentors and mentees and from those preferences, then we do the final matchings and the last tip that I have is to proactively recruit.

And this is particularly important for mentors. There are a lot of people who are not aware of what a mentor role entails and do not realize that they would make a good mentor and they don't realize how much value they could provide. So sometimes all it takes is for someone to come up to them and say, hey, I think you'd be a great mentor. Would you consider volunteering? And that can make a huge difference in, in getting them involved. For the mentees. We found that in the application or selection process, it's helpful to ask the mentees at that time about their goals for the mentorship and to secure their commitment. And this helps to gain greater engagement and commitment from them. Once the program does start, we've had a lot of great success in our mentorship programs with extremely high positive feedback rates from both our mentors and our mentees. I've included a quote here from one of our mentors in the outreach program who not only enjoyed working and, and meeting the talented students in the program but also found increased satisfaction in her own work. In summary, mentorship is a powerful tool for building pipelines growing careers and helping to retain talent in stem particularly for women in other underrepresented communities.

Mentorship programs can provide the structure to help employees get involved so that they can tap into the power of mentoring and to recap some of the key takeaways that I shared today for building effective mentorship partners or to build effective mentorship programs. Um The first one was that training for both mentors and mentees is critical for success. Two, you want your mentees to drive the relationship. Three, you want to be thoughtful about matching your mentors and mentees and four to proactively recruit. I hope you can take the learnings and tips that I've shared today to build your own effective mentorship programs and to help grow your stem talent and together we can make a difference. Thank you. And we do have some time for questions. So let me go over it to the chat window and feel free to type in any questions that you may have. OK, so I see we have one question here. Um So the question is, I'm wondering what types of challenges have you seen in building mentorship programs or just in mentorship in general? So that's a great question. Uh So I think one of the key challenges with mentorship partnerships is keeping the engagement. It's really easy to get just wrapped up in your current deadlines and the current work that you, you, that you're involved in and it's easy to put it off and say, oh, I'll just, I'll do that mentoring thing later. So the hard part is keeping people engaged.

And so that's why things like securing the commitment ahead of times, setting time bounds on how long that mentorship partnership will last can be helpful. Um Is then you know that you only have this limited amount of time and you want to make the most use of it. Yeah. OK. We've got another question here. How do you convince a potential mentee that they could really benefit from mentorship or is that maybe the wrong approach? So that's a great question as well. I think um it can be helpful first of all to present to them uh some of the benefits that mentees have um have gotten from mentorship partnerships. Um It's also important to think, to keep in mind that it may not be the right time for them. So everyone has their own career journey and they have periods where they may be growing more and periods where they may not be growing as much. And that can be just part of that career journey, it can be part of just what's going on in their personal life or work life. So uh keep in mind that it may not be the the right time for them to participate in a mentorship activity. Uh And it may be another time that you want to revisit it. There could be other also approaches uh that uh the mentee might or potential mentee might want to take the there are different types of programs.

Some are one on one mentoring, there's mentors circles or maybe classes more suit their style. And in that moment, it can depend on just where they're at, what they're looking for. Ok. So thanks for the great questions. We are at our 20 minutes. So thank you again, everyone for attending. And I hope that uh this was useful for you in building your own effective mentorship programs. And I hope that um we can all work together to help, help, continue to build our stem pipeline. Thank you, everybody.