B!G Mentor Interview – Niamh Harman

It was lovely to meet up with Niamh Harman from Salesforce to get her thoughts on being a Mentor. Salesforce offers enterprise and small-business CRM solutions for sales, marketing, customer service, IT, and more. Niamh was great fun to talk to, and she felt very passionately about her role as a Mentor.

What is your name, and what do you do?

I’m Niamh, and I am currently working at Salesforce, and I am a lead designer there.

Why do you think creative skills are important at the second level?

I think they are really important; everyone is creative in their own way, but maybe just hasn’t tapped into that, so I think it’s really important to explore that at an early age. The best time for creative learning in school.

Can you take us through the process of The B!G Idea mentoring?

As mentors, we would have received pitches from students and teachers, then been put into a group with other mentors. So, we would have been able to see their feedback. It was interesting to see the different trends and patterns, and then people from different industries kind of gave different advice as well. So we would have fed back at that point, and then the students would have gone away, taken the feedback on board, and presented a final project, which we would then rate and vote on. It was a really structured process, and we were kept in the loop every step of the way.

What was the most important part of mentoring for you?

Seeing the potential was amazing; I was blown away by some of the ideas that I came across. Just the creativity of the students and the enthusiasm as well were amazing.

Would you have benefited from The B!G Idea when you were in school?

Absolutely so I did art in school but being honest when I went to college, I didn’t really have those creative thinking skills so I struggled and I think it was probably only my second year in college that I really started working on those creative thinking skills but I think if I had of been taught them at an earlier age like at Transition Year it probably would have geared me up better for third level.

Did you enjoy the mentoring process, and did you feel supported through it?

Yeah, I loved it, it was really cool. Again, the potential, the ideas, the enthusiasm, it was a really fun process.

Would you recommend mentoring to others?

Yes, absolutely, it really opened my eyes. I was excited to see the ideas that they came back with. I got a lot out of it, and I thought it was really rewarding, so I’d totally recommend taking it on.

Want to join Niamh and an incredible bunch of Mentors?

• Visit our Mentors page