The Adult-Mentor Pipeline for Vietnamese Adolescents 14–19: A Six-Channel Taxonomy and Operational Protocol Beyond the School-Counsellor Channel

I5.1 documented that the Vietnamese schoolcounsellor channel established by MOET Circular 31/2017 is uneven in implementation: dominantly part-time staffing, heterogeneous training, role drift toward discipline support, structurally weak school-to-clinic referral. Consequence: a Vietnamese adolescent aged 14–19 needing adult-mentor support for academic, career-decision, mental-health-prelude, or projectmentorship needs cannot rely on the school counsellor as a single sufficient channel. This paper maps the broader adult-mentor pipeline operationally available and produces the protocol by which an adolescent identifies, approaches, engages, and sustains mentor relationships across it. The synthesis draws on the youth-mentoring base (Rhodes 2002 Stand by Me, DuBois et al. 2002/2011/2018, Spencer 2007, Pryce 2012, Karcher 2005, Hagler–Rhodes 2018, Erickson–McDonald–Elder 2009, Schwartz et al. 2018), the career-mentoring base (Kram 1985, Eby et al. 2008, Allen et al. 2004), the cross-cultural Confucianheritage base (Watkins–Biggs 1996), Vietnamese counsellingpolicy and family-research (MOET Circular 31/2017, Đoàn Văn Điều et al., Phạm Lan Hương, Phạm Thị Ly), and onlinecommunity youth research (Krasnova et al. 2010, boyd 2014, Steinberg 2014). The substantive output: (a) a six-channel taxonomy — school counsellor, classroom teacher / cô chủ nhiệm, extended-family adult, alumni network (cựu học sinh), online community, paid coach — with each channel's strength, capacity, risk, age-appropriateness, cost, and cultural-fit; (b) a fiveaxis matching exercise (need × channel × age-appropriateness × cost × cultural-fit) usable by a 16-year-old without prior mentor experience; (c) a four-component relational-skill set — approach, engagement, sustainment, exit — calibrated to Vietnamese context with I3.3 reframings carried in (filial concern as resource not obstacle, indirect-communication respected, advisory plurality structured rather than dismissed); (d) four worked examples across academic-help, career-decision, mental-healthprelude, and project-mentorship. Three displacement failure modes are named: single-mentor reliance, peer-friend-as-mentor conflation, paid-coach-as-substitute for relational mentorship. The paper takes the I5.1 referral-pathway architecture and the I3.3 cultural-anchor matrix as inputs and produces the channeland-skill operational layer between them and the adolescent reader.