A mentoring programme is as strong as the people who bring it to life.
Piano C has not only the responsibility of recruiting the Italian cohort of the STAR Girls Dream Team, we were also asked to design the selection process itself, including the application questionnaire used by all five partner countries. That meant thinking carefully — and at a very early stage of the project — about a question that is harder than it sounds: what does a good mentor actually look like?
Building the questionnaire: small questions, big intentions
The application form needed to serve five different countries, multiple languages, and a very wide range of potential applicants. It also needed to stay short enough that busy professionals would actually complete it. That tension — between thoroughness and accessibility — mostly shaped every choice we made.
From the beginning, we knew that professional achievements alone would not tell us what we needed to know. A strong CV can demonstrate expertise, but mentoring requires something more: the ability to reflect on one’s own experience, to communicate honestly, and to connect with another person’s uncertainty without rushing to solve it.
For this reason, the application process combined questions about professional background with questions designed to explore motivation, self-awareness and willingness to share personal learning. We were interested not only in what candidates had done, but in how they made sense of their journey, how they described challenges, and why they wanted to become mentors now.
We also asked practical questions about availability — hours per month, modes of participation — because a mentor who cannot show up consistently is, in practice, no mentor at all. The STAR Girls methodology developed by FIRDA is explicit about this: the relationship is not a means to an end but the foundation. Continuity is not optional.
What the applications told us — across Europe
Looking at the full pool of applicants across all partner countries, a picture emerged. Most applicants brought direct technical experience in energy, including work in renewable energy systems, engineering, research, policy and vocational education. At the same time, each country contributed its own distinctive mix of expertise and professional perspectives.
What united them was not a particular profession, but a willingness to reflect on their experiences and share them with the next generation.
One of the most encouraging aspects of the process was the quality of the applications themselves. Across countries, we encountered women with impressive professional backgrounds, but also with a strong willingness to share their experiences openly and honestly. In many cases, the challenge was not deciding whether someone was qualified, but deciding how to balance different forms of expertise, experience and perspective within a finite number of places.
On breadth and what it means
We had initially envisaged a Dream Team anchored primarily in technical and energy-sector expertise. That was the clearest fit for the programme’s goals: girls in VET considering careers in clean energy are most directly inspired by women who work there.
In practice, reaching the right number of high-quality mentors — women who not only had relevant backgrounds but who also demonstrated the relational qualities that effective mentoring requires — meant widening the scope. We made that choice deliberately rather than quietly, because the result is genuinely defensible on its own terms.
The energy transition is not built by engineers alone. It is built by lawyers who navigate regulatory complexity, communicators who make new technologies trusted and understood, HR professionals who shape inclusive hiring, educators who introduce the field to the next cohort before they have even chosen a path. A girl who is curious about sustainability deserves to see that breadth reflected in the people she might be matched with.
What did not change, regardless of sector, was the standard we applied to relational quality. Whether a candidate was a project engineer or a brand strategist or a less academic and more practical route, we were looking for the same things: the ability to talk honestly about difficulty, an awareness of how gender shapes professional experience, and a genuine motivation rooted in experience — in remembering what it felt like to navigate important decisions without a guide.
What stayed with us
Reading through the applications, one message appeared again and again, regardless of country, profession or career stage: meaningful careers are rarely linear.
Many applicants spoke about uncertainty, unexpected turns, opportunities they had almost missed, and confidence that was built gradually rather than possessed from the beginning. Again and again, we encountered versions of the same idea: that growth comes from movement, not from certainty.
Some of the reflections that stayed with us were remarkable in their simple clarity:
“Don’t wait to feel ready — confidence is built while learning, not before.”
“You don’t need to have everything figured out to start.”
“Clarity comes through action, not overthinking.”
“When someone tells you ‘no’, it often means ‘not yet’.”
“Don’t be afraid to take up space. You belong here just as much as anyone else.”
“When I entered the PV market, women were under 5%. What I missed most was a female role model to show that we belong and can lead.”
“The future needs your ideas, your energy, and your unique way of seeing the world.”
These are not platitudes. They are the residue of lived experience, compressed into a sentence. They reflect a collective wisdom shared by women from different countries, sectors and generations. And they are exactly the kind of messages that young women considering their future rarely hear often enough.
What comes next
The selection process is only the beginning. The next phase of STAR Girls focuses on preparing mentors to build meaningful and effective mentoring relationships.
FIRDA, which developed the STAR Girls mentoring methodology and the quality framework underpinning the programme, will deliver a transnational training in the Netherlands at the end of September to build a common understanding of the STAR Girls approach, including relationship-building, mentoring boundaries, active listening and reflective practice.
Following the transnational training, each partner organisation will deliver national training sessions with its own cohort of mentors, adapting the methodology to local contexts while maintaining a shared European framework and a common quality standard.
The methodology — grounded in relationship quality first, in the gradual building of trust, and in honest storytelling that includes doubt and detour — is a natural fit for the mentor cohort selected across the partner countries.
These are women who already know that the most useful thing you can offer a young person is not a roadmap, but an honest account of how your own journey unfolded — often in ways you could never have predicted.
We look forward to seeing what happens when they meet their mentees.