What a year! In 2021 we set a good foundation to be able to achieve even more in 2022. As the year comes to an end, I’d like to reflect on what our team accomplished and share with you our biggest milestones of 2022. First and foremost, I’d like to thank all 800+ mentors, coaches, workshop facilitators, and other partners who have been helping us achieve our mission of helping (not only) women grow in their careers. Here are some highlights of what we have achieved this year with your help.
This year we surpassed the number 1,000 in matched mentees. Since 2019 when we started with the mentoring program, our mentors have helped over 1,000 (not only) women with their career challenges. This year, we matched over 450 people with their mentors, which is almost a 30% growth since last year. Like last year, we worked on the improvements in the program, and the scalability. Our internal matching tool got a major upgrade and helped us match the mentees with their mentors at higher speed.
This year we focused on recruitment of more international mentors to be able to serve our clients in the UK and Germany. Our current database consists of 850+ mentors from 47 countries. 55% of them are based in the Czech Republic and the rest in major European and US cities. This year we have made many improvements in our recruitment, as well as in the onboarding process. Currently, we’re accepting only mentors who meet 80% of the application criteria. We created a Mentor Training for our mentors and regularly created new resources. We also have a new mentor tiering process in place and an option to get paid for mentoring. Our mentors now have access to their mentor account where they can update their information easily.
We were able to organize two cohorts of the Leadership program, which means we have helped around 100 women with their leadership skills since the start of the program in 2020. Next year, we’re making adjustments to the program based on the feedback received, and are planning to run a more robust program to help women improve their leadership skills.
This year we worked with many companies to help them develop their employees. We have worked with bigger companies such as Barclays, Avast, Ceska Sporitelna, but also with local and global startups and scaleups. Our mentors have been mostly focusing on helping the employees with their leadership skills, confidence, and other soft/hard skills needed for growth in their roles. The overall satisfaction with the mentor was 4.9/5 and 95% of the participants would like to get a mentor again.
In October we organized our second conference in the beautiful spaces of WPP Campus in Prague. This year’s conference was more interactive. The program was a combination of panel talks, workshops, mentoring and networking. The audience could choose if they want to focus on leadership, career change or career growth topics. Check out the highlights from the conference here. Spoiler alert: Our third conference is coming in fall 2023.
Thanks to the cooperation with companies and our mentors who donate their earned amount to the scholarship fund, we were able to offer scholarships and discounts to students, women on maternity leave, or young people from children’s homes and socially disadvantaged backgrounds and refugees. We launched a scholarship fund for people in financial need and awarded 50+ people with (almost) full scholarships to join the mentoring program. We also awarded 7 Ukrainian refugees with full scholarships. We continued our collaboration with the non-profit Nadání a Dovednosti and matched 14 young people from children’s homes and socially disadvantaged backgrounds with their mentors. Next year, we’re planning to match another cohort of around 25 young people and give away more scholarships.
In May I moved to Berlin, and I have been focusing on building the community here as well! We launched the community with Founding Membership, and now we have over 100+ community members, and over 100 mentors and mentees. We organized a community meetup to launch the community, as well as partnered with the International Women Berlin community to co-organize events focused on Imposter Syndrome, Negotiation and Kicktstarting a career in tech. Berlin is a very diverse place full of expats, so we’ll continue our community building efforts next year as well to help more women with their careers.
Early this year, we launched a new DEI Palette community to open up DEI topics. We have been organizing events focused on Employee engagement, Creating an LGBTQ+ inclusive workplace, Unlearning unconscious bias and Creating a sense of belonging. These events and topics are open to all DEI enthusiasts or specialists, HR and leads who care about DEI.
All this wouldn’t be possible without our amazing team - a big shout out goes to the core team Ellen, Petra, Michaela, Petr, Martina, Rose, Beatriz, and my co-founder Klara, for going above and beyond to make all the things above happen.
Next year, besides many new initiatives, we’re planning to continue doing what we do the best - finding the right career mentors for people who want to grow, in a more scalable way. Keep an eye out for new updates and initiatives on our LinkedIn.
Thank you all for following us and supporting us on this journey! We wish you Happy Holidays and a great start of 2023!
