Katy Dickinson

86 SEED Participants Selected

Late yesterday, I announced the selection of the 86 participants in the Sun Engineering Enrichment and Development (SEED) mentoring program for the 2008-2009 terms. The worldwide Sun-Engineering-wide selection took months of work in preparation by the SEED program staff and our partners in Sun Human Resources, plus the essential contributions of the applicants, their managers, and the recommenders.

We very much appreciate the time and trouble that everyone put into developing their SEED materials. Whether or not the applicant got into SEED this time, I know it takes a great deal of work to apply and the work is much appreciated! Thanks also to the SEED Selection Committees for their time in reviewing and picking the new participants!

Participants in the SEED program for the two terms which start in September 2008 were chosen based on professional performance and manager's recommendation, with consideration given to the other factors included in their applications. We picked two distinct groups yesterday:

• 23 September 2008-September 2009 Recent Hires (12 month term)
• 63 September 2008-March 2009 Established Staff (6 months)

The next steps for new participants is to create their 15-name Mentor Wish Lists and their personalized SEED web pages (for potential mentor review). Here are some general metrics on the new SEEDs:

	Location of Participants
             1 Australia, 1%
	     1 Canada, 1%
	     3 China, 3%
	     7 Czech Republic, 8%
	     1 Finland, 1%
	     1 France, 1%
	     2 Germany, 2%
	     5 India, 6%
	     2 Ireland, 2%
             1 Israel, 1%
             4 Italy, 5%
             2 Japan, 2%
	     1 New Zealand, 1%
             1 Russia, 1%
             3 Spain, 3%
 	     1 Sweden, 1%
             2 Switzerland, 2%
             4 UK, 5%
	     42 USA, 49%
		7 Central USA, 8%
		7 Eastern USA, 8%
	        28 Western USA, 33%

	Division of Participants
	     4 CTO/Sun Labs, 5%
	     1 Marketing, 1%
	    10 Microelectronics, 12%
            20 Sales & Services, 23%
	    34 Software Group, 40%
	     5 Storage Group, 6%
	     4 Systems Group, 5%
	     5 Worldwide Operations, 5%

Tanya Jankot and I have been answering happy emails ("I'm so happy to be a SEED participant. Thanks for your kind advice and great help!"), frustrated emails ("Need answers please!"), and requests for more information ("How come xxxxx didn't make it into the SEED program? Can you give me a call?"), or all three ("I am ecstatic that two of my direct reports, xxxxx (new hire) and xxxxx (established staff), made it through. However, I'm very disappointed that xxxxx, a star performer in my group, did not make it. I would definitely like to talk to you to understand the rationale for his not making it so that we can keep that in mind for future applications.") from applicants, managers, and recommenders. Lots and lots of emails...

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is available at http://research.sun.com/SEED/

Posted at 01:37PM Jun 19, 2008 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |