Life Skills 101 Feasibility Study

Background/Rationale 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 leaders. 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. Despite soft skills importance, evidence confirms a "skills gap", meaning that youth lack soft skills that are highly important in the workplace. 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.

Given these challenges to individuals' academic performance, work achievement, 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. A key priority for HEIs is to promote a comprehensive approach to education, by putting students' transversal skills on an equal footing with profession-specific knowledge and skills. One efficient way to address this, in a way that can reach as many interested students as possible, is through incorporating the necessary material in existing, popular and frequently offered elective or mandatory courses, in which training these skills is suitable.

In the present study, the investigators aim to examine the feasibility of embedding a classroom-based soft skills intervention within a tertiary curriculum. This course covers cutting-edge research on how people acquire self-regulatory skills enabling them to achieve personal, academic, and professional goals. Students will learn through instruction and experiential methods, how these discoveries relate to needs, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors, and what tools can be used to achieve their goals.

Study aims/Objectives

The primary objective of this study is to assess the acceptability and feasibility of the "Life Skills 101", a novel psychoeducational course for students in higher education. The secondary objective of this study is to evaluate potential effectiveness of the course by measuring students' acquired knowledge and improvement on self-insight. The specific objectives of the study are to:

1. Determine feasibility and acceptability of the psychoeducational soft skills intervention.

   1. To estimate feasible recruitment and refusal rates.

   2. To measure key outcome domains such as completion rates, missing data, students-reported measures of social satisfaction.

   3. To determine the acceptability of course resources and factors influencing this.

   4. To measure participants' willingness to participate in highly specialized soft skills training.

2. Estimate effectiveness in terms of changes over time in knowledge, improvement in self-insight and psychological flexibility.

3. Use findings to refine the program and inform the development of a future large-scale randomised control trial (RCT).

4. Explore associated changes in mental health (only RCT pilot).