Professionalizing counseling at BUAD-UAEMéx: An experience on certification

Abstract

At the beginning of 2025, the Distance University High School (BUAD) of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEMéx) formally incorporated its corps of tutors into the Institutional Academic Tutoring Program and initiated the certification of 100% of its members under Competency Standard EC0477 of the Consejo Nacional de Normalización y Certificación de Competencias Laborales (CONOCER). This article reconstructs the design and implementation of the project and analyzes its scope from two complementary perspectives: as a quality assurance policy—by standardizing criteria, products, and traceability—and as a pedagogical mechanism that makes explicit (and assessable) the decisions underlying the planning, implementation, and evaluation of tutoring in distance education. Rather than viewing certification as a bureaucratic requirement, the experience suggests that the standard functioned as a shared framework that organized an already existing practice and provided it with institutional continuity, particularly in a context where academic support tends to become fragmented across digital channels and asynchronous timelines.