"I came back with a good feeling," says Álvaro Lleó, professor in the Department of Industrial Organization at Tecnun, after returning from the CUIEET, a university congress that, after 25 years of experience, has become a reference forum for professors who want to improve their teaching. "I have seen professors really excited about their classes and full of new ideas. Besides, being able to contrast how we do things here with other universities gives you very interesting ideas for improvement. We are on the right track," he says. 

Álvaro Lleó and Nacho Pérez, student graduated in Industrial Technology Engineering in May, presented the mentoring program Tu&Co mentoring program at the University Congress on Educational Innovation in Technical Education that took place in Badajoz last September 5,6 and 7. Nacho, who will be doing his Master's Degree in Industrial Engineering this year, has developed his final thesis on this program because he was interested in improving the skills it covers.

Tu&Co emerged as a result of a doctoral thesis carried out in the Department of Industrial Organization at Tecnun. The objective was to improve student advising, one of the pillars of the University of Navarra's ideology, and to provide advisors with better tools to help the School's students develop academically, professionally and personally as much as possible.  

"One of the great strengths of Tu&Co is that a program that has been developed 100% at Tecnun. In the School there is a great mentoring culture and very experienced professors. Our interest was to compile the experience of the advisors and define a mentoring program with all this" says Álvaro Lleó, Academic Director of the program.

The program begins with a personal evaluation of 12 competencies (4 interpersonal, 4 personal effectiveness and 4 self-management) comparing the student's self-perception with an external evaluation of 3 people. Then, through analysis exercises, the student is expected to increase his/her self-knowledge and identify his/her strengths and weaknesses. Finally, through the competency guides, concrete guidelines are presented to help the student enhance his or her talent. "With the program I saw how I was in certain competencies and from there, I have focused a lot on them, on how to improve the ones I had low scores and how to enhance the ones I had with better scores," confesses Nacho Pérez.

Another of the keys to the program is the interest in continually improving it. "What we went to present at the CUIEET congress are the results of the analysis of 56 interviews with professors and students in which we presented 10 key factors for university mentoring," he continues.

Now, Álvaro Lleó and Nacho Pérez are developing an app to make everything "easier", working on new cases and looking at how to improve training plans.