People with disabilities are more vulnerable to unemployment and social exclusion, making the role of job coaches essential in supporting the labor inclusion of the most vulnerable groups. However, during the pandemic lockdown, many challenges arose in continuing to provide professional counseling, mainly due to a lack of digital skills for online mentoring and job coaching.

The project aims to bridge these digital gaps by creating an e-Scape Room used for assessing and training work-related skills, while also contributing to reducing the digital divide.

• Support professional training
• Assess and develop work skills
• Reduce the digital divide

The project’s innovation is based on the creation of an accessible RPG (Role-Playing Game). The game features a series of challenges, called puzzles, specifically designed to assist job coaches during their training activities.

Throughout the development process, co-creation activities were followed and employed to encourage a participatory approach in creating the final output (e.g., personas and scenarios, map and object creation, storyline, prototypes, technology architecture, etc.).

The development lifecycle followed the Agile methodology, releasing new puzzle updates incrementally.

• Framework RPG Maker
• HTML5
• CSS
• JavaScript

The e-Scape Room has been in production since March 2023 and is currently used by tutors and job coaches in vocational training across four European countries: Austria, Estonia, Greece, and Spain.