Frequently asked questions.

mentro is the learning documentation. What learners used to keep in Word, Excel or a folder is created continuously here: activities, learning journals and evidence in one place, visible to the training company at any time. The legally required training documentation is covered, without reconstructing anything at the end of the semester.

The learning documentation is kept continuously by the learner: what they worked on and learned. The learning report or journal is the written reflection on it. The education report is the semi-annual review between company and learner on the official SDBB form. mentro covers all three, and the education report builds on the first two.

Yes. Activities can be captured regardless of location, including from inter-company courses and vocational school. They are mapped to the same curriculum competencies as work in the company and count equally towards the competency picture.

mentro is a platform for Swiss vocational education. It brings activities, learning journals, competencies and education reports together in one place, for trainers and learners. At its core is an honest, scientifically grounded measurement of competencies rather than an interchangeable collection of tools.

mentro brings together evidence from six sources (activities, journals, observations, practical assignments, education reports and grades) and weights every record by how reliable its source is: an observation or a sign-off by you counts considerably more than a self-report. Who assessed a competency is traceable at any time.

Primarily for trainers in training companies who support their learners. Learners document their activities and reflections, and organisations gain standardised processes and better data quality.

All data stays in Switzerland. The servers are at cloudscale.ch, we run the database at peaknetworks in an ISO 27001-certified Swiss data centre, and the AI runs at Infomaniak. Deliberately no US providers, so no foreign law can reach the data. Transmission is encrypted (TLS), and every company sees only its own data.

When a learner records an activity or a journal, mentro automatically maps the text to matching competencies from the curriculum. The recognised competencies appear directly on the entry. This produces documented proof of competence with no extra effort.

Not generated, but written by hand and carefully selected. mentro maintains a pool of over 80 pedagogically developed reflection questions in five stages: from simple description through analysis to comparing several perspectives. Each period, an AI picks the five that fit, matched to the learning year, the competency and the learner's actual activities. Every reflection is guided, but never schematic.

No. A licence is always tied to a learner. Trainers and instructors are included without limit.

Currently Computer Science VET (Application Development), Computer Science VET (Platform Development), Media Engineering VET and Digital Business Developer VET are available. More professions are added continuously. Tell us which profession is relevant to you.

The pilot starts in August 2026 with selected training companies. There is currently no self-service sign-up; activation happens through a personal conversation. Book a demo or apply to be a pilot company.

mentro runs as a web app in the browser, on desktop and smartphone alike. Native iOS and Android apps are on the roadmap. Learners prefer to record their activities on mobile, while trainers often review on the desktop.

CHF 10.– per learner per month when paid yearly, excl. any VAT, with the full feature set including AI. Billed monthly it is CHF 12.– per learner per month. Supervisors are included without limit, and there is no minimum, no base fee and no setup fee. Industry associations, cantons and education institutions get volume conditions on request. More plans will follow once self-service is available.

Yes, with the greatest weight. mentro grades every piece of evidence by source: your observations and graded practical assignments count far more than learners' self-reports. A competency only counts as achieved once several independent sources agree, including at least one observation or review from you as the trainer.

Yes. You create practical assignments, learners work on them, you grade them. The grading feeds into the competency picture as strong evidence. You see progress per competency area.

Yes. mentro fills the real SDBB form as a PDF, not a lookalike. Trainer and learner sign electronically; for minors, parents confirm via a secure link. A digital fingerprint ensures nothing can be changed afterwards.

App, website and the learning journal questions are available in German, English, French and Italian. You can switch the language at any time in the menu.

mentro runs in the browser on phone, tablet and computer. Every feature is available everywhere: capturing activities, writing learning journals, recording observations and creating the education report. Native iOS and Android apps will follow after the pilot.

You can export your data at any time as JSON (education reports also as PDF). After the contract ends we keep it available for export for 90 days and then delete it, within the scope of data processing and the legal retention obligations of the training company.

Yes. The obligation is not written into the federal vocational and professional education and training act, and not into the federal ordinance on vocational education and training. It is set out in the training ordinance of each occupation. For the Computer Science VET occupation, Article 12 states that the learner keeps a learning documentation during the practical training and records all essential work relating to the operational competences as it happens. At least once per semester the vocational trainer checks and signs this documentation and discusses it with the learner. In mentro the documentation grows out of the activities and learning journals you record day by day, and the person supervising you can see at any time what has been added since the last meeting.

It does not produce a grade. In the training ordinance for the Computer Science VET occupation the overall grade is made up of the practical work, general education and two experience grades, and the learning documentation does not appear in that calculation. It is, however, allowed as an aid during the individual practical work, together with the documents from the inter-company courses. Whether the same applies to your occupation is written in the training ordinance for your own profession, there is no single rule covering all occupations. With mentro your entries are sorted by operational competence, so during the exam you quickly find the piece of work you are looking for.

At the end of each semester, so twice a year. The training company records how the learner has developed professionally and personally, and agrees on the goals for the coming semester. In practice the official SDBB form is used for this, and mentro uses exactly that form. It is signed by the trainer and the learner. In mentro the evidence from the whole semester is already there, so you do not have to reconstruct six months at the end.

You do not have to look for it separately: mentro uses the real SDBB form, not a lookalike. It is produced directly from your documentation and comes out as a PDF. The evidence from activities, journals and reviews sits right next to it, and you write the assessment yourself. Signing happens electronically, and for learners under 18 the parents confirm via a secure link. You can download, file or print the finished PDF at any time.

Stay concrete and write soon after the event, those are the two most important rules. Describe a real situation from your working day instead of general sentences, and write it down while you still remember the details. mentro guides you with over 80 carefully selected questions in five stages: Describe, Perceive, Analyse, Transfer, Cross-check. Step by step you move from what happened to what you take away from it.

An appraisal meeting is the conversation between trainer and learner in which you go through the education report together: what went well, where the learner stands, what comes next. It usually takes place once per semester, together with the education report. To prepare, look at the activities and journals of the past months in mentro, plus the competency picture with the documented and the still open areas. Both sides then enter the conversation with the same facts instead of memories of the last few weeks. At the end, record the agreed goals directly in the report.

No, mentro has no import function, and we will not promise you something that does not exist. The simplest way is a cut-off date: from that day the documentation runs in mentro, everything before it stays where it is today. Older records can be filed as a document with an activity so they remain easy to find. In practice the start of a semester works well as a cut-off date, because the next education report then builds cleanly on the data from mentro.

For a small company with one or two learners, a spreadsheet or a document does work, and we will not pretend otherwise. It starts to break down once the documentation grows: searching becomes tedious, nobody can tell later when an entry was actually written, and there is no link to the competencies in the curriculum. In mentro the learner records things in the moment, and the entry is mapped automatically to the matching competencies. At the end of the semester you do not have to reconstruct anything: you write the education report directly on the real SDBB form, and the evidence for it is already there. On top of that, the servers and the database are in Switzerland instead of files sitting on scattered drives.

We do not compare ourselves with individual providers, we simply say what mentro does. First, everything is recorded in the moment instead of reconstructed at the end of the semester, and every entry is mapped automatically to the competencies in the curriculum. Second, the competency picture comes from six weighted sources, namely activities, learning journals, observations, practical assignments, education reports and grades, and mentro shows depth and breadth per operational competence, weighted by source, instead of a single number. Third, the path ends on the real SDBB form, not on a lookalike. Fourth, all data stays in Switzerland. And the price is simple: CHF 10.– per learner per month with yearly billing, excl. any VAT, CHF 12.– monthly, supervisors included without limit.