Life Skills Boot Camp Study (LEVELUP2)

The role of Higher Education in sustained economic growth, and social progress is critical. HE institutions (HEIs) as key 'future shaper' settings, host a significant proportion of talented youth, future workforce, and leader (Cawood, Dooris, \& Powell, 2010; Suárez-Reyes, Muñoz Serrano, \& Van den Broucke, 2019). Entering university marks a turning point for youth, since HEIs can empower young people to transform and expand skills to manage complex and global environmental and societal challenges.

Soft skills, such as the ability to set goals and achieve them, to regulate emotions, to demonstrate agility and adaptability, and manage interpersonal relationships, are now an emerging trend for tackling global economic and societal challenges (World Economic Forum, 2016; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2019). In addition, soft skills related to mental and physical health, wellbeing and adjustment, have received growing interest over recent years, and have become even more critical in the context of emerging needs to build resilience in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and in preparation for future crises (Bauer, et al. 2021; Liang, et al. 2020; Nearchou, et al. 2020; Rousseau, \& Miconi, 2020).

Despite soft skills importance, evidence confirm a "skills gap", meaning that youth lack soft skills that are highly important in the workplace (Noah, \& Aziz, 2020). Although students in HE commonly graduate with excellent technical academic skills to do well in their future profession, it is highly debated whether higher education graduates also have developed sufficient soft skills essential to do well at the workplace (Noah, \& Aziz, 2020).

Given these challenges to individuals' academic performance, work achievement, and mental health, it would be advisable to equip students with the resources required for life success. As these skills become increasingly of central interest to communities, it becomes a pertinent question on how to expand them within the academic context by learning relevant information and practicing skills in a way that is responsive to the needs of the wider student community.

To deal with these situations, different types of skill training interventions/ competence-based education within HE, have been created to help students develop skills for self- development (e.g. Rubens et al., 2018) and alleviation of mental health symptoms/mental health promotion (for metanalyses see Conley, Durlak, \& Kirsch, 2015; Conley et al., 2017; Yusufov et al., 2019). Current findings suggest that a) incorporating specific components (such as coping skills training or CBT and relaxation techniques for stress management, Yusufov et al., 2019) and b) specific training methodologies such as supervised skill training (Conley, Durlak, \& Kirsch, 2015) or short-term/ brief trainings (Yusufov et al., 2019) may be beneficial for students and increase the feasibility of integrating these interventions in the HE context.

In addition to determining the active ingredients of interventions, defining pragmatic challenges, such as the best methodologies to coordinate and integrate such interventions within the HE context are also of key importance (Conley et al., 2017). Continued research is needed to identify the specific systems and practices that will place students in an active role to define self-development goals and practice, in a systematic and guided form, some of these soft skills in real life settings.

During the last decades, increasing attention toward multitiered frameworks of interventions has emerged, as an approach that takes into account the role of the context and the level of provided support to facilitate the personal competencies of all students (Jimerson, Burns, \& VanDerHeyden, 2015; Arora et al. 2019). Τhe EU funded project LEVEL-UP (Ref: 2020-1-CY01-KA203-065985) is based on this kind of logic and aims to develop an innovative framework that lies in a 3- level support system that follows a linear, progressive fashion, starting from the broader application to the narrower one. According to the conceptualization of the project, in level 1, students will have the opportunity to gain up-to-date scientific knowledge on transversal skills through an introductory course. Through this course, students will be able to self-reflect on these skills and develop an Individual Skills Development Plan (ISDP). After completing the introductory course, each student will have the opportunity to broaden as well as to deepen specific transversal skills (based on their ISDP), through stepwise, guided and multi-contextual practical training. Specifically, students will be able to enroll in skills development programs (group-based) offered by experts within the HEI (level 2), practice, apply and refine them through feedback. Finally, in level 3, participants of level 2, who are identified through self- and instructor evaluation as presenting significant challenges in specific skills domains, would be able to develop and consolidate these skills under a more intensive and individualized supportive program.

The present study is part of LEVEL UP project and its focus is to test the conjunction of the two levels of the proposed framework: at level 1 students get research-informed knowledge on soft skills and self-reflect on the level of mastery of these skills, and at level 2 they develop specific skills through the participation in an intensive and supervised skills training. The primary goal of this study is to determine the feasibility both of delivering level 2 as a standalone low-intensity skills training (with no pre-requisite) and as a part of the two-level system (level 1 as a pre-requisite for to participate in level 2). Specifically, we aim to examine the feasibility and acceptability of embedding a series of group-based soft skills trainings within university educational operations. These trainings cover three vital soft skills training topics: a) how to regulate emotions, b) how to interact with others in an effective manner and c) ways to build flexibility and their resiliency.

Study aims/Objectives

The objective of this study is to assess the acceptability and feasibility of the "Life Skills Boot Camp", a series of soft skills trainings for students in higher education. The acceptability and feasibility will be explored from the perspective of stakeholders, including students participating in trainings and trainers who provide them. The specific objectives of the study are to:

1. Determine feasibility and acceptability of the skills training by
2. estimating feasible recruitment and refusal rates.
3. measuring key outcome domains such as completion rates, missing data, students-reported measures of social satisfaction.
4. determining the acceptability of course resources and factors influencing this.
5. measuring participants' willingness to participate in highly specialized soft skills training.
6. determining the acceptability of the boot camps as standalone training.
7. Identify under which conditions the "Life skills boot camp" are of added value to students' personal and professional development by
8. recording the antecedents associated to students' perceived usefulness of boot camps trainings. In specific, perspectives of both students with previous relevant experience (having a boot camps training as a follow up to a previous introductory soft skills course) and students with no relevant experience will be evaluated in terms of training usefulness.
9. Evaluate the preliminary changes in soft skills and mental health of HE students after implementing the two-level soft skills intervention.
10. Examining changes in positive mental health, depression, anxiety and stress before the introductory course (level 1) and after the soft skills bootcamps (level 2) (only NL).
11. Analysing changes in social, emotion regulation, coping and resilience skills before and after the soft skills bootcamps (level 2) (only NL).