Professional skills program: TU&CO

The competencies and their development are the basis of this mentoring program, which aims at having the person seeking improvement analyze his or her behavior in order to make a diagnosis of his or her competencies and suggest proposals for reflection and action.

Professor Pablo Cardona defines competencies as "those observable and habitual behaviors that make possible the success of a person in his activity or function. They are a result of the innate characteristics, knowledge, motivations, and skills of people."

Thus, the 12 most in-demand competencies are:

1. Self-awareness
2. Effort capacity
3. Communication
4. Emotional Balance
5. management of conflicts
6. Time management
7. Social skills
8. Initiative
9. Integrity
10. Optimism
11. Decision-making
12. work as a team

This program begins with an initial assessment of the competencies (through a questionnaire) that will provide sufficient information for further analysis together with the work notebook . Once the competencies that need to be worked on have been diagnosed, we will move on to the section of Improvement Plans, in which each one of the competencies is developed to make it easier for both the mentor and the student to work .

First of all, the student must know how he/she sees him/herself and how others see him/her. To this end, a competency profile will be drawn up based on an assessment of 12 competencies.

 To carry out the assessment, the mentor will request four questionnaires through the Tu&Co platform: the student will have access to a self-assessment questionnaire and three links to three people who know him/her well (a family member, someone from class and a lifelong friend, for example). 

These questionnaires include 48 questions referring to critical behaviors that determine the Degree possession of the different competencies. 

The answers will be used to prepare your competency diagnosis or profile , which you will discuss with your mentor.

Once the student's competency profile report is available, it is time to take the next step: analyzing the results obtained. In what he/she is strong and in what he/she can improve; what can be useful to support him/her and what should be the object of attention for improvement.

This step is a core topic and therefore both the student and the mentor have the work notebook at their disposal on the platform, which will guide them in analyzing the results.

In the platform, the guide for each of the 12 competencies appears in order to develop the improvement plan based on the skill or competencies that the student decides to improve.