Whether through speaking, educating or advising, there is a way to give back
One person can make a difference. Commit to share best practices, offer support and spark imagination about what is possible within technology. Fulfil your desire to make an impact.
Small enough to keep, structured enough to matter
Informal mentorship fails quietly. Someone offers to help, two calls happen, calendars fill, and the relationship evaporates without anyone deciding to end it. BTMP removes that failure mode by treating the pairing as a project: a charter, a cadence, a review and an exit condition.
You are not asked to teach a syllabus. You are asked to do the thing a curriculum cannot: tell a specific person, every fortnight, what is still missing between where they are and where they are trying to get.
- Two hours of scheduled session time per month
- Mentor training completed before your first session
- A written development plan you both sign in week one
- Quarterly reviews with the programme team
- A clear escalation path if something is not working
Six steps from application to first session
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01
Apply
Fifteen minutes. Tell us your discipline, seniority, availability and what you would most like to pass on. We ask for one reference from a current or former colleague.
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02
Train
A two-hour asynchronous module on giving feedback, the difference between mentoring and sponsorship, boundaries, and what to do when a mentee goes quiet.
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03
Match
We match on discipline, career stage, timezone and communication style. You see two candidate profiles and choose; so does the mentee.
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04
Plan
In week one you and your mentee write a development plan together: three outcomes, the evidence for each, and the dates. You both sign it.
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05
Meet
Fortnightly sessions of 45–60 minutes with an agenda and written action items. Asynchronous review in between when there is work to look at.
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06
Review
Every quarter the programme team reads the plan with you both and decides: renew, re-match or graduate. Nobody drifts for a year.
Current gaps by discipline
These are the areas where mentees are currently waiting longest to be matched.
Cyber Security
Detection engineering, incident response and cloud identity. Longest current wait: 6 weeks.
Embedded & Robotics
Firmware, control systems and ROS 2. Hardware mentors are the scarcest group on the platform.
ML Engineering
Not research — deployment, evaluation, monitoring and the unglamorous data work underneath.
Engineering Management
For mentees moving from senior IC to lead, and for founders who suddenly have reports.
Product & Design
For Shipyards founders who can build but cannot yet decide what to build.
Go-to-Market
Pricing, positioning and the first ten customers — Accelerator phase and beyond.
Mentor application
Fifteen minutes now, a two-hour training module later, and your first match within three weeks. Fields marked with an asterisk are required.
What happens next
You receive a confirmation immediately, a reference request within two working days, and an invitation to the next mentor training cohort — they run on the first Tuesday of every month.
What mentors ask before they apply
Two scheduled hours a month, plus perhaps an hour of asynchronous review. Mentors who try to give more than that in the first quarter are the ones most likely to burn out and disappear, so we actively discourage it.
Extremely. The gap between a mentee and a mid-level engineer is often more legible than the gap to a principal — you remember the specific things that were confusing, and you were recently on the interview loop they are about to face.
Say so, then show how you would find out. Watching an experienced person navigate their own uncertainty is one of the highest-value things a mentee can observe, and it is almost never modelled in a classroom.
Many do. We provide a one-page summary for managers, and partner companies that run our organisational training typically allocate mentoring hours formally.
Mentor training up front, a template development plan, a monthly mentor forum, a named programme contact, and an escalation path if a relationship becomes difficult.
Not ready to commit to a full match?
Guest speaking, one-off portfolio reviews and mock interview panels all need volunteers, and take an hour or less.