Once you have a great project, you will be able to match it with experiences.
Whether you initiate the match request to an experience, or an educator sends you a match request to your project, a critical part of matching will be communicating with the experience administrators to go over the details of your project and the details of their experience to ensure they are aligned and that all expectations are properly set.
Here are the best ways you can ensure a match between your project and an experience is successful and set up for the success of both your company and the learners who will be working on it.
Before sending or responding
Before responding to a match request you have received, or before sending one to an experience, make sure you:
Read the experience. Make sure you fully understand the details of the experience including the level of learners, learning objectives of learners, timelines.
Determine if your project is a good fit. Based on the experience description, will your project fit the timeline, level, and objectives of the learners? If it doesn't quite fit the mold, think about ways you can slightly modify the scope, deliverables, or overall objectives of your project to better fit the experience. Maybe you can drop a nice-to-have deliverable, or maybe you can shift the focus of the project to emphasize one part of it over another.
Write down questions ahead of time. After you read the experience description, come up with a list of your own questions which will help clarify any expectations or details you would like to know. Examples include:
Will I be expected to attend regular meetings?
What skills will the learners have?
What quality of work output can I expect?
Who will be my main point of contact from an administration point of view if I run into problems with the learners?
Schedule a meeting
Schedule a meeting between yourself or the experience administrator. During this meeting:
Everyone should introduce themselves.
Re-introduce the scope of your project and the expected deliverables.
Suggest changes to your project details to better accommodate the experience learning objectives.
Ask as many questions as you can about the experience and the learners ensuring you fully understand the expectations of them from their educator.
Confirm any timelines including final due dates and milestones.
Confirm any commitments the educator would like you to make such as recurring meetings with the learners or attending a final presentation.
Accept the match request
Assuming all the above goes well and you are ready to confirm the match of your project to the experience, make sure you:
Take any preparatory actions you need to take before learners begin to work on your project.