Recently, the MEGASKILLS Project consortium meet in Brussels to review the work accomplished in the first year of this “mega” partnership. Together with a group of experts and the project officer from European Research Executive Agency, we celebrated the goals reached and areas to improve.
The project started by reviewing the core challenges concerning the recognition of soft skills in the labour market, in the educational context and the possibilities of using massive date from current massive usage of video games in society.
In its inaugural year, we achieved the initial milestone of identifying and establishing a preliminary consensus pact for the taxonomy and normalisation of soft skills, aligning with the perceived needs of both industry and education sectors. This accomplishment culminated in the publication of our inaugural report titled "Taxonomy and Soft Skills Model," wherein we defined 30 soft skills deemed essential for the 21st century. This comprehensive list was derived from exhaustive literature reviews and extensive consultations with domain experts.
Following this critical phase of research, we identified the "Big Three" Soft Skills — Critical Thinking, Complex Problem Solving, Adaptability, along with Time Management — as vital in the 21st century. Moreover, these skills were earmarked for development through commercial video games. Consequently, we have embarked on the next phase of our project, leveraging these three core skills to conduct rigorous testing. Our objective is to determine their practicality, feasibility, and unique applicability. An experimental study involving over 100 participants is currently underway to validate the efficacy of utilising video games as a viable means for soft skills training. We aim to establish correlations between in-game interactions and the indicators measured by selected standard tests, thus affirming the viability of this innovative approach.
Parallelly, we've advanced the development of our intelligent platform tailored for the assessment and certification of soft skills. Once operational, this platform will meticulously analyse data generated by users engaging with videogames and undergoing standard tests, thereby evaluating their proficiency and mastery of specific soft skills.
The next year, the consortium will complete the skills testing and finalise the training and evaluation techniques through the use of the massive amount of data from the interactions of players with their favourite video games (considering the very high penetration of video games among working-age citizens in Europe) and the use of AI and machine learning algorithms.
At the same time, piloting will be carried out in use case scenarios in labour and educational contexts to bring the research results closer to agile educational methodologies.
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