Would recommend the Mentor training course run by the IET, its a good starting point and shows what resources are avaialbe from the IET.
I hadn't realised there was a Mentors only discusison area (although I think I remember seeing some emails about moving to Office 365 but they looked like spam/phishing).
So far I have no mentees and there is no way of knowing if I am visible to people searching for a mentor in my area.
Yes, we are moving some of our forum services over to Office 365 in the New Year to make use of its capabilities. As a volunteer, you have access to its functions for free. Please email profdev@theiet.org for more information on this.
There is no public view for mentor availability. This is a process that is currently handled manually by the team. We shall see if there are any available mentees in your area.
...there is no way of knowing if I am visible to people searching for a mentor in my area.
I'm sure you've thought of this already, however just to mention that I do make sure that my employer - in particular the HR team - knows I'm a mentor. In fact both times I changed jobs recently the HR department were very interested during the recruitment process to discover I was a mentor (and PRA). I've always had far more mentees through my employers than directly through the IET - and that's fine. Of course the applicability of this depends very much on what type of company you work for (and their attitude to PEIs).
I've also had people make contact through seeing my footer here, and through my LinkedIn profile.
It's a huge shame more people don't look for mentors through the IET "official" route - it would be interesting to know why. One reason might be that if members make contact with a mentor informally then it's relatively easy to walk away if it turns out to not be quite what they want, whereas I do wonder if there's a concern that if they apply for a mentor through the IET they'll be sucked into a process they can't get out of - which of course is not actually the case at all. But that's only one (slightly educated) guess.
