# Introduction

### **What is The Linux Foundation Mentorship Program?**

The Linux Foundation Mentorship program, developed by Linux Foundation, serves an important role in creating a structured hands-on learning opportunity for mentees—students, new and active programmers who want to learn open source software development— to gain exposure to open source development. The program matches mentees, based on their skills and interests, with mentors to learn and contribute code to open source projects, and get paid for it. This program serves an important role in keeping open source communities strong, healthy, and sustainable.

The Mentorship program brings in the accepted mentees and mentors from participating projects to a single platform. Accepted mentees get opportunities to learn open-source software development and get hired by the potential employers participating in the program. A structured and well-defined mentoring program is crucial to attract and develop new talent. In a nutshell, it is all about making connections between new developers and experts in communities, and prospective employers, and get more open source code written for the benefit of all.

## **‌Goals of the Program**

**‌**The Mentorship program is designed to help people with necessary skills, many of whom are first-time open source contributors, to experiment, learn, and contribute effectively to open source communities, which can initially seem overwhelmingly vast.

Following are the core goals of the Mentorship program:

* Help mentees learn and enhance their technical skills, and inspire them to become long-term active contributors.
* Teach aspiring developers the open source culture and collaboration norms, and guide them to participate in open source community more effectively by using collaboration tools and infrastructure.
* Strengthen projects and the communities that are crucial to the Linux ecosystem by improving security and quality of releases.
* Provide a skilled and diverse talented pool of prospective employees trained by experts to companies in the ecosystem of related technology.
* Add well-trained and educated diverse talent to projects, and inspire them to write code for open-source software products for the benefit of the entire community and users.

## **Program Structure**

The Linux Foundation Mentorship program lasts three months 12-weeks for full-time terms, or six months, 24-weeks for part-time terms. As a mentor, you will be engaged with the mentees throughout the program, starting with the application process.

Please see [Program Schedule & Timeline](/lfx/mentorship/mentorship-program-timelines.md) for term schedule and activity timeline.


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