On the 22nd of April, the Kick-off meeting of the new E+ project “WORK@BLE - Digital Job Coaching for Disadvantaged People”, coordinated by Fundación Intras, has taken place online with the participation of the representatives of the 6 partners of the consortium. WORK@BLE aims at developing new tools and innovative methodologies to support persons affected by mental disabilities or with special learning needs through a digital job coaching platform. In particular, the objective is to improve the digital competences of educators and job coaches that support people with disabilities in accessing the job market and in their social integration through a digital training in response to the covid-19 pandemic. The platform will be developed as an E-Scape Room to assess and train job skills. Job coaches will be trained to assess the “work@bility” of people with disabilities and to acquire new competences to improve their services and better support them. In turn, people with disabilities will benefit of an improvement of their “work@bility” thanks to an increased awareness of their own skills and motivation for job seeking.
The E-Scape Room: what is it?
The E-Scape Room developed by the project will be an educational video-game to assess the skills and competences that the final users, i.e., the job coaches, have trained during the job coaching process with the aim of improving their coaching services for people with disabilities. The E-Scape Room will be designed as to have several proofs and questions related to the trained skills to assess the “work@bility” of the people with disabilities. The user will have to solve the proofs to get the numbers of a lock combination that opens the door to get out of the room and enter in the open job market. The proofs will be designed based on these three stages job coaching process:
- Get Ready: identification of one’s own strengths and training on transversal skills;
- Get Steady: identification of one’s own objectives and acquisition of self-awareness and confidence;
- Go!: positive presentation of themselves, capacity to find a job on the internet, development of the necessary skills to face interviews.
The partners:
Fundación Intras, the coordinator of the project, will be in charge of the administrative and financial management and will ensure the coordination and the cooperation between the partners. Moreover, it will be co-leading the game concept design and the relative guidelines, together with the partners Dafür (Germany), Astangu (Estonia), Theotokos (Greece) e Lyk-z & Drote (Norway). Social IT will be responsible of the technical development of the E-Scape Room and of the organization of the training of job coaches involved by the other partners on the use of the platform.