When the project has been presented the severity of youth unemployment across EU and working poverty drawing attention to the need for high quality, relevant youth skills development, with a focus on increasing skills for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship. The factor that unites all professions and on which to work to facilitate access to the labor market for young people was and is that of soft skills. In fact, combined with technical and academic achievement, soft skills are critical to young people’s success in the workplace and their development in all domains of life.

COMPETE! main aim was that of tackling skills gaps and mismatch through design and development of an educational/serious game involving directly students and other stakeholders, mainly universities and enterprises, in the elaboration of relevant learning outcomes and design of adapted learning, teaching and assessment approach.

Outputs produced:

1. Research working paper on soft skills for employability, check IO1 here 
2. Learning is a serious game: Recommendations for the development of serious game aimed at fostering soft skills development among graduates
3. COMPETE! Game
4. COMPETE! Toolkit – training package and game guide

The project, cofunded by the Erasmus+ programme, allowed the consortium and stakeholders activated all along project implementation to deeply understand which the need of soft skills is to approach the labour market, detect skills gaps and mismatch in order to provide solutions to the difficulties of recent graduates in entering the world of work and at the same time study the phenomenon of serious gaming connected to the results emerged by the field research and so find a match among expectations and existing tools/games, analysing some key characteristics and their attractiveness for the target group. 

This in-depth research activity contributed to the development of a serious game for the acquisition of soft skills by young people approaching labour market and a training package connected to this game that has to become a tool for teachers and trainers in order to enhance the quality of teaching and supporting the use of digital technologies and online delivery to improve pedagogies and assessment methods.

COMPETE!, for the methodology adopted and the flexibility of results produced can also be used in the field of adult training or in vocational training, given the transversality of soft skills that concern not only the professional life, but also the personal life of individuals.