Youth Employability Training and Self-Development Framework Erasmus Project

Project Title

Youth Employability Training and Self-Development Framework

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Early School Leaving / combating failure in education; ICT – new technologies – digital competences

Project Summary

Background: It is increasingly recognised that having career goals, setting targets and taking ownership of their own future career plans can lead to more positive career outcomes in young people. To maximise their potential young people should start thinking about their future career at a young age. However many young people do not engage in career planning and personal development planning and lack aspirations, attitudes and confidence with respect to future careers.

Over the last ten years there has been an upsurge of interest in using digital games for learning and attitude and behaviour change. This has emerged from optimism that the engaging features of entertainment games could also be deployed to motivate learning. However, games also offer methods of learning that are highly consistent with modern theories of effective learning, which propose that learning activities should be active, situated, problem based, interactive and socially mediated.

It was felt that a game could provide an active, decision-making approach to supporting young people in thinking about careers. Consequently the aim of the YOUTHYES project was to design, develop and evaluate a game to support career planning and career management skills in 13 – 19 year olds.

The project had 5 partners. The University of the West of Scotland was the project coordinator and partners were the University of Iceland/ Haskoli Islands, Iceland, the University of Reading, England, the Open Universiteit Netherlands, Netherlands and Fundatia Centrul European de Resurse pentru Dezvoltare, Romania.

Key activities at the start of the project included a literature review of career management and decision-making resources that identified a number of relevant technology-based interventions but few career games; a review of existing digital employability and careers resources that identified digital and paper and pencil materials and tools that careers guidance practitioners use in practice, and a user requirements analysis that helped to establish what potential players would like to see in such a game.

Using the findings of these early project activities a design specification was developed that guided the development of the Youth@work game. The game was firmly grounded in 2 key career theories: the Skills Development Scotland (SDS) model of competences that identifies 4 key features that young people need to be aware of in thinking about their careers: self, strengths, horizons and networks (Scottish Government, 2012), while Holland’s (1959) theory of vocational interests is used to suggest appropriate and personalised careers to the game players.

An online training course provides support for the game, allowing teachers and careers counselors interested in using the Youth@work game with young people between the ages of 13 and 19 to use the game most effectively. 5 Best Practice Case studies and 5 Use Case Scenarios were also developed to provide useful and more specific guidance about how partners have used the game and how the game might be used, for example to encourage young people to study STEM subjects. The game and online support materials are available in English, Dutch, Romanian, Icelandic and also Greek and German. A Utube video provides a very useful short walkthrough of the game. It is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRXQTwQJ51c.

Results: Early piloting of the game suggested that school pupils liked the game, although they thought it more appropriate to those in the lower age band, 13-15 years. Since this is the age at which young people start to choose school subjects this was useful feedback.
The large scale evaluation of the final game aimed to establish the value and effectiveness of the game in interesting and supporting young people in career planning and career management activities. Nearly 500 young people took part in this but a Randomized Controlled Trial was carried out with 93 Icelandic and Romanian students. Half the students played the Youth@work game and the other half performed a paper-and-pencil version of the same activities. The main results show that engaging players in these career-oriented activities had short term effects on outcome scores for career adaptabilities and for perceptions of career learning competences. It can therefore be concluded that introducing game-based learning in career decision support for youth is a promising endeavour.

Impact: Throughout the project, and especially towards the end, local dissemination events were held by the project partners to showcase the game to interested teachers and careers counselors. In addition conference presentations and academic publications helped to show the game and project results to those with a more academic interest in the game.

The online game and all publically available deliverables can be found at Project website www.youth-at-work.eu. It is hoped that this will provide a resource that stakeholders across Europe use.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 269381,28 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF SCOTLAND & Country: UK

Project Partners

• THE UNIVERSITY OF READING
• OPEN UNIVERSITEIT NEDERLAND
• HASKOLI ISLANDS
• Fundatia Centrul European de Resurse pentru Dezvoltare