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Career Mentoring in Online Communities: Seeking and Receiving Advice from an Online Community

Published: 02 May 2019 Publication History
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    Although people frequently seek mentoring or advice for their career, most mentoring is performed in person. Little research has examined the nature and quality of career mentoring online. To address this gap, we study how people use online Q&A forums for career advice. We develop a taxonomy of career advice requests based on a qualitative analysis of posts in a career-related online forum, identifying three key types: best practices, career threats, and time-sensitive requests. Our quantitative analysis of responses shows that both requesters and external viewers value general information, encouragement, and guidance, but not role modeling. We found no relation between the type of requests and features of responses, nor differences in responses valued by requesters versus external viewers. We present design recommendations for supporting online career advice exchange.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2019
      9077 pages
      ISBN:9781450359702
      DOI:10.1145/3290605
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      Published: 02 May 2019

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      Author Tags

      1. career advice
      2. employment
      3. online communities
      4. online mentoring interactions
      5. q&a
      6. working adults

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      • (2024)Navigating the Job-Seeking Journey: Challenges and Opportunities for Digital Employment Support in KashmirProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373758:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
      • (2024)CareerSim: Gamification Design Leveraging LLMs For Career Development ReflectionExtended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650928(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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