FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

Hi FRC Teams and Volunteers,

The Volunteer Resources Department has been hard at work this summer improving many resources to enhance our volunteer’s experience with FIRST. At the FIRST Championship events, we held feedback sessions with our volunteers to find out how FIRST could improve and one of the things we kept hearing was that the volunteer roles did not accurately represent what the responsibilities were. We took this feedback and revamped the volunteer role descriptions; taking the time to put them in the same format and adding details to make it clearer what the volunteer time commitments are, the role responsibilities, and the minimum experience and skills needed for each role. You can see the updated roles here.

You may notice that all key volunteers now have a minimum age requirement. This is because these roles have a higher level of responsibility. While a minimum age requirement does not guarantee a volunteer is ready to take on a higher level of responsibility, it does help, in the same way having minimum driving and voting ages help ensure people are ready for those significant responsibilities.

We also received helpful feedback over the past few years on how volunteers register with FIRST. You may be happy to hear that our new Volunteer Registration has launched as of August 22^nd. We believe this new site will provide a better experience for our volunteers. Volunteer Registration is now accessible under the www.firstinspires.org dashboard. If you previously had a volunteer account, you can use your same username and password to access Volunteer Registration. To access the dashboard, simply go to www.firstinspires.org and click the ‘login’ or ‘sign up’ button in the top right corner of the page. This means team mentors and event volunteers can now log into a single system! FRC events are still not live, but you can login, update your volunteer profile, and see the improvements that have been made. You may notice in the top right corner a number in a red circle, this is indicating action items you have to complete including things like agreeing to our YPP Policies and our Terms & Conditions.

We hope these enhancements improve our volunteers experience and help make our events more consistent for the teams. As always, if you have any volunteer questions please email: volunteer@firstinspires.org.