Mentoring Opportunities
Are you a mentor with a professional career who wants to lend your knowledge to high-potential university students in a virtual work-integrated program?
Applications are now open!
How it Works?
Our programs run for 3-weeks but can run up to 6-weeks as well, where teams of 5-6 students work collaboratively to deliver a consulting project for a Government Agency, Business or Nonprofit. They will be supported by a structured program, learning content via Practera’s technology platform and a mentor.
The program aims to provide:
- Students with an opportunity to develop 21st-century employability skills, as well as expand their social connections.
- Mentors with an opportunity to develop their mentoring and coaching skills by supporting a culturally diverse team of students as they work on solving a business problem for a real client.
Mentor Requirements
To mentor a student with Practera, you will need to be:
- Available to attend a mentor orientation session
- Available 1-2 hours per week throughout the program
- Able to provide advice and support to student teams through our online platform
- Have 1+ years of professional experience to share with your team
Sounds like you?
Interested in mentoring a team of students? Great! Just complete this form, and we’ll be in touch to let you know about our upcoming mentor-based programs.
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Mentor Testimonials
“As a mentor who worked closely with the team across 3 weeks, there are details of the team collaboration outcome that are evident. For example, unique skills brought into the team dynamic, team spirit, paying attention to details, which I find are beyond just what the project entails (In terms of addressing and working towards client’s project brief requirements)”
– Mun Wong, Graphic Designer & Marketing Coordinator at the
Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
“As a mentor, I have been humbled by this experience since 2019 by directly seeing the enormous talent that springs out of Australia’s universities and the fearless courage of students from here and across the world who enter the Practera program. I am amazed at how students come together as a team to provide best in class research, critique and actionable solutions to real world challenges faced by governments, SMEs and large enterprises as well as community organizations. Practera’s framework allows students to be creative, think across the practical and actionable spectrum to give clients what they urgently need: choices around concrete solutions.”
“Working as a Practera mentor to students at UNSW was a richly rewarding experience. Guiding a small group of hardworking students to put together research and strategy for a real-world client problem, and engaging the client directly, was an opportunity to share some of the things I’ve learned as a management consultant and to encourage their growth to see immediate results. The students were eager to learn real-world business skills and rose to each challenge I set for them.”
– Julissa Shrewsbury, Director, New Work Consulting
Frequently Asked Questions
You will be mentoring a team of 5 – 6 students, all studying different tertiary disciplines. Some will be Masters students, others undergraduates. The majority of students will be studying a non-technical field (e.g. marketing, finance, international relations, policy).
They will be working on non-technical projects such as doing and analysing market research, creating a social media strategy or performing a competitor analysis.
The students commit to a minimum of 50 hours of work each, over the three week period. They also commit to act as business consultants and cater to the needs and schedules of their clients and mentors. For a longer program, the hours of commitment per student will vary.
Yes. Although it can be useful to have specific industry knowledge, it is not a prerequisite. The role of the mentor is to keep their student team on track and within the scope of the project. When a challenge arises, whether it is project or team related, the mentor’s role is to support the students to come up with their own insights by asking them clarifying questions and getting them to think differently about the challenge.
Yes! You can either have both the client and mentor come from the same organisation, or have one person submit a brief as a client and another be the mentor for an external client.
- Support your team to come up with their own insights rather than giving them the answers
- Be aware of your own biases
- Apply emotional intelligence and empathy
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Yes! All of our mentors are recognised with a certificate of appreciation and thanked personally via our program posts on LinkedIn.
- Our mentor related programs run all year round and can be for either in-curriculum programs or extra-curricular programs during the major holiday breaks.