Career Advice in a Flash

The federal government is taking a lesson from the dating book when it considers how to foster mentoring relationships among federal employees.

The Office of Personnel Management last week hosted a speed-dating-like event that brought human resources leaders together for mentoring sessions with experts across government, including OPM Director John Berry.

Kathryn Medina, executive director of the Chief Human Capital Officers Council, said Friday that the flash mentoring event is part of OPM's HR University initiative, which launched last year and offers online- and classroom-taught courses for federal HR employees. Last week's event included roughly 100 participants and 25 mentors from across the federal government, she said.

"One of the goals of HRU is to ensure we're building the future of HR professionals to be strategic partners," she said.

Medina said one objective is to go virtual with the flash mentoring concept, at least when it comes to providing the tools to other segments of federal workers across the country. There also is an "open door" for taking the actual event virtual, she said.

"We know how beneficial these events are, but we can only physically do them in the D.C. area," she said. "How do we empower other pockets - whether they be federal executive boards or other agencies across the country - to be able to replicate that in person. We're working on putting the tools and resources online so you can basically have flash mentoring in a box."

As I wrote last week, the social networking website GovLoop is dramatically transforming the concept of mentoring across the federal government through virtual mentorships, where federal employees and other government workers are matched up with other workers in different agencies and on different levels of government. "It's a little like eHarmony," said GovLoop founder Steve Ressler. "What we saw is that the generations are looking for mentoring opportunities. So they can create a profile, get matches and accept the match."

Thus far, OPM has had great success with HR University, now hitting its goal of having 10,000 registered users on its website and having received the Deloitte Public Service Innovation Award for the 21st Century earlier this month, Medina said. "We're really proud of all the attention and success of HR University," she said. "It's great that our resources are being used for flash mentoring and that we have 10,000 people in our community. We'll just continue to build products and tools for our customers."