Afmentor.com - support and a community for those involved with the Air Force
Title
AF Mentor
A website focusing primarily on Air Force Writing and other Air Force mentoring issues
Description
Excerpted from the website: In 2002 a PowerPoint presentation was created for a Top-4 organization because some of the members realized the Staff and Technical Sergeants were not prepared for the world around them. This PPT contained a lot of information junior NCOs were not getting from AF SNCOs. Many of the members recognized and felt the huge disservice this was doing to the enlisted corps. A year later, it became extremely noticeable the PPT was no longer the right tool to share the information. Thus it was moved to the Internet. Here, the audience grew from a small squadron of enlisted personnel to a global presence.
Do to the autonomy of the Internet, this site gets a lot of questions and provides a tremendous service to the corps. As I learned with the PPT exercise years ago, the human psyche plays against walking into the "boss's" office and telling him/her "I don't know" or "I am ignorant to the question/task".
Today there are thousands of people who visit the site daily, and there are hundreds of "Airmen" contributing to the site in one way or the other. These contributors realize the importance of sharing information with "Airman" through out the world. Some of these contributors become "Key" and their guidance and recommendations are sought after. Key contributors are asked to stay on with the site and support questions or issues when they appear. As with any entity, key contributors come and go but each has brought significant knowledge and experience, and left their mark on many.
Webmaster Credentials
Defining the credentials of the webmaster is tricky as there is no true class that makes anyone the end all in any realm. With this said, the webmaster is active duty Air Force with a genuine concern for building a better Air Force and the desire to ensure Airman of all ranks have a starting point to find the answers they seek. The key word is starting point to find answers. The webmaster is not by any stretch of the imagination an expert in many issues or any issues. Instead the webmaster utilizes knowledge and experience to help point those with questions in the right direction. Users need to judge for themselves the direction in which to go, the site only provides one source of such information.
To quote the ever popular PFE/PDG :
- A mentor is defined as "a trusted counselor or guide.Mentoring, therefore, is a relationship in which a person with greater experience and wisdom guides another person to develop both personally and professionally."
It is hard to quantify and qualify ability or capability or more simply put expertise in the subject... To say the webmaster did this and this and this, and then say he/she is this or most knowledgeable in this skews the intent. Looking at most Air Force careers, members get trained on many things for their profession; thereby, they build knowledge, experience, and contacts. This training does not make them the most knowledgeable, rather it produces individuals with the right connections and knowledge levels to find the answers from those whom they believe are the experts or most knowledgeable.
