A Multi-case Feasibility Study for "Life Skills Boot Camp": Mastering the Skills for Professional and Personal Success' Training Program

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.