Between 2024-01 to 2024-05, I was one of the mentors in the Futurice’s Generative AI Group Mentorship program where I mentored 6 software developers from all over Futurice offices in Finland, Germany, Sweden and the UK.

The objective of the program was to bridge the gap in Generative AI core concepts and advanced development by learning to develop advanced Retrieval Augmented Generation applications.

Here is how I did it: With the help of Sanni Moilanen from our Human Care team, we created a plan for the program consisting of 1 kickoff meeting, 5 sessions and 1 final retrospective session across 5 months. The sessions were 1.5 hours long and recurring every 3 weeks

Kickoff meeting Link to heading

In the kickoff meeting, I introduced the program and we got to know each other. We had a Miro board with following questions we took to fill for 10 minutes and then shared individually:

  1. Name of the mentee
  2. Intro and your story
    1. Who are you and what do you do at Futurice?
    2. Where are you located?
    3. Hobbies and interests
    4. Last book you read? or podcast? or movie you’d recommend?
  3. Why did you choose to join this GenAI mentorship program?
    1. What do you hope to learn?
    2. What are your expectations and wishes from the program?
  4. On a scale of 1-5, how familiar are you with AI and Generative AI? (1 being not familiar at all, 5 being very familiar)
    1. Any past projects? hobby projects?
    2. Any online courses?
    3. Frameworks and libraries you’ve used?
  5. How familiar are you with AI tools?
    1. When did you last use ChatGPT?
    2. What’s the dumbest thing you’ve asked ChatGPT?
    3. Is there an AI project or application that you’ve found fascinating recently?
  6. What’s one skill or concept you’re excited to learn more about related Gen AI?
    1. Any tangible outcome or achievement you’d like to look back in the end of the program and say ‘I accomplished that because of this program.’
  7. What is one aspect you hope this mentorship program avoids so that it remains valuable and engaging for you?
    1. Any concerns? potential pitfalls?
  8. Anything else you’d like to share?

I then shared about the main learnings objectives where I introduced ‘What is RAG?’ to get us all in the same page about definitions.

I also shared about the mentorship curriculumn that I prepared beforehand and asked for feedback. People had some good suggestions and I revised the curriculumn accordingly.