Educators can send a match request to match their experience with a project, and if accepted, the project becomes available to learners within the experience to work on. Educators may also receive match requests from projects wishing to match with their experience.
General
Compatibility rating
Before a match request is submitted, you will have the opportunity to check the compatibility of your experience to the project with the compatibility checker. Your experience will be evaluated against the project comparing items such as descriptions and meta information like categories and skills. A rating of great, good, fair, or poor will be assigned along with a written explanation of the compatibility.
Ratings
Great
Near perfect compatibility with no or very few changes needed to the project.
Good
Strong compatibility but might benefit from minor changes to the project to make it a better fit.
Fair
A starting point for compatibility but the project should be changed to better fit the experience.
Poor
Heavy project modifications will be necessary to make this more compatible.
You can use these ratings as a quick way to determine if there is strong compatibility between the experience and the project. You should pursue matches with high ratings while potentially reading project descriptions and proposing changes to the project scopes with low ratings.
The compatibility rating is visible to all parties as part of the match request.
If you do not check the compatibility before submitting a match request, one will automatically be generated.
Custom questions
Educators are able to set custom questions on an experience that will be asked to employers who submit match requests to the experience. These questions can be used to help educators filter projects by outlining specific needs and criteria up front such as detailed project needs, mandatory meetings / availability for learners, NDA requirements, resources the employer needs to provide to learners, or any other criteria the educator is looking for.
See the full guide to custom questions here.
Scope negotiations
Projects and experiences are rarely a absolutely perfect fit for each other. Usually the project details, deliverables, or just general scope will need to be modified in some way to ensure the learners of the experience have proper expectations set. As part of the match request process, you will be able to propose changes to project scopes in order to facilitate this.
Changes can be proposed at the same time as the initial match request is made, or any time while the match request is pending.
Proposing changes to a match request will require both parties to accept the changes and the match request again if either one had already accepted a previous version of the project details.
Once a match request is accepted, the most recent version of any proposed changes will become the final version which is then displayed on the match page and is what all users will see when viewing the project details.
This final version of the project details is final and cannot be changed once the match request is accepted.
How to
Send a match request
After you have found a project you want to match with, you can send a match request by following these steps:
Click the "Request match" button on the project you wish to match with.
Choose an existing experience you have or to create a new one to match with this project.
Follow the step by step prompts to complete filling out your match request.
You will be able to compare the experience to the project and check for compatibility on step 1
You can propose updates to the project details on step 2 including:
Project details like name, goals, and deliverables
If your experience is paid for learners, you will be able to set compensation details.
If your experience requires unique dates per project, you will be able to set start and end dates along with any milestones as well
Finally you can write an introduction to the project administrators introducing yourself and why you think this will be a good match for your experience
Click the final "Send request" button to finish.
Your match request is now submitted. The project administrators will receive a notification alerting them to your match request and you will be put into a conversation with them where you can talk about the project details, timeline, and general expectations.
View a match request
After having sent or received a match request, you can either:
Click the inbox icon in the top navigation bar to view all match requests
or
Navigate to your experience
Click on the "Requests" tab to view requests specific to that experience
On the match request page you'll find:
Send messages to the project administrators
The best thing you can do when sending or receiving match requests is to communicate immediately with the project administrators. You will be launched into a conversation between with the project administrators to facilitate this as soon as the match request is created. You can view and send messages in this conversation by either:
Click the messages icon in the top navigation bar
Click the conversation associated with the match request
or
Navigate to the match request
Click "Send message" in the sidebar
Propose changes to the project
At any point after a match request has been sent or received, you may propose changes to the project details (and in some cases compensation details and timeline) by following these steps:
Navigate to the match request
Click on the "Propose changes" button above the project scope details.
Fill in the form making any edits you wish to propose.
Click the "Propose changes" button at the bottom of the page.
After proposing the changes, you will be directed back to the match request page. You can view your changes by clicking "Show changes" button next to the project scope.
Any content you added to the project will be highlighted in green.
Any content you removed will be highlighted in red.
Proposing changes to the project will reset any acceptance of the match request. If you or the employer had previously accepted, both parties will need to re-accept the changes.
Extend the expiry
Match requests expire within 21 days by default if they have not been responded to.
You portal administrators may have set a custom match request expiry length different than 21 days. This will be reflected in the expiry date if applicable.
You should always strive to accept or decline the request as soon as possible to let the project administrators know your decision so they can pursue alternatives if you aren't moving forward.
If however you are still in discussion with the other party as the expiration approaches and do not want to accept or decline immediately, you can extend the expiry of the match request by following these steps:
Navigate to the match request
Click on the 'Edit' link next to the expiry date.
Enter the number of days you want to extend the expiry date and click "Submit".
Accept a match request
Whether you sent or received a match request, you must accept it in order for the match to be confirmed. Only when both parties, the project administrators and the experience administrators, have accepted the match request will the match be formed.
Navigate to the match request
Click the "Accept request" button.
The match between your experience and the project is now complete!
Undo an accepted match request
If you have accepted a match request by mistake, or wish to no longer match with a specific project, you can undo an accepted match request by following these steps:
Navigate to the match request
Click the "Undo" button.
You may only undo a match request acceptance if the project administrators have not accepted.
Cancel an accepted match request
If you both parties have accepted a match request by mistake, or wish to no longer match together, the match request can be cancelled by following these steps:
Navigate to the match request or match page
Click the cancel icon button.
You may only cancel an accepted match request if the associate project has not been started by a team of learners.
Cancel a pending match request
If you have sent a match request out of error, or no longer need to match with the project, you can cancel a sent match request by following these steps:
Navigate to the match request as seen in viewing a match request
Click the "Cancel request" button.
Decline a match request
Employers are often willing to modify their project to meet your needs. Make sure you connect with them via your match request conversation before declining a request outright. You can also propose changes to their project as part of the match request directly (see above).
If the project in the match request is not a good fit for your experience, and you and the project administrators have communicated and are unable to come to terms on what a good match may look like:
Navigate to the match request
Click the "Decline request" button.
Make sure you provide a reason for declining so the employer knows why.
Close an experience
An experience can be marked as open or closed to further match requests. By default upon publishing any experience it will be marked as open and thus employers will have the ability to submit match requests to the experience and you will be able to submit match requests to projects.
If you have matched with all the projects you wish to match with, you can manually close your experience by following these steps:
Navigate to your experience
Click the "Settings" tab
Click the "Marketplace" tab under the "Matchmaking" group
Under "Is this experience available for new match requests", select "No"
Click "Submit" to save
Automatically close an experience
You can have your experience automatically close to match requests on a specified date by setting your close date:
Navigate to your experience
Click the "Settings" tab
Click the "Marketplace" tab under the "Matchmaking" group
Enter the "Close date" you prefer
Click "Submit" to save