Abstract:

According to the report on the future of jobs by the World Economic Forum [1], critical thinking and problem solving are at the top of the list of skills that employers believe will grow in prominence in the coming years. In addition, other skills have gained emphasis with the COVID-19 pandemic, such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. Therefore, several programmes and policies are being developed in order to promote the development of these competences to keep pace with the rhythm of change, the skills of the future and the transformation of jobs.

With this in mind, an escape room was conducted involving representatives of entities with experience in the field of employability and professional and social inclusion, to promote the experimentation and the debate about the value that games can offer to develop such skills. Escape room activities became popular in team dynamics, as they create an environment that rewards players for working together, solving puzzles, and completing successions of logical and critical thinking tasks, to complete the challenge in the time allotted [2]. In this respect, escape rooms have parallels with key soft skills in the labour market, such as communication, teamwork and facility in performing different tasks [3].

The basics of any game involve working as part of a pre-defined set of rules to achieve a goal. This, in consequence, will require collaboration, critical analysis and problem-solving skills of those involved [4]. Thus, the promotion of social skills among individuals through 'escape room' activities becomes a suitable strategy for the development of such skills. Moreover, knowledge sharing, through teamwork, is a synergic process as it promotes the development of each individual's strengths and collaborative problem solving [5].

In these activities, teamwork will generate healthy competition and social connection among the work team. Moreover, the fact that the individual does not want to be a weak link in the team will encourage each one to contribute. Moreover, this process sharpens the creativity of the participants, develops initiative, problem-solving skills, and leadership [6]. Encouraging the sharing of ideas, experiences and opinions between participants depends on a strong bond developed during the activity. Due to this characteristic, gamified activities need to be combined with feedback during and after the games, in order to promote the reflection of activities and the discussion of strategies to provide individuals with an understanding of the process [7].

In this study, participants were organised in groups, and challenged to solve a set of challenges, within a pre-defined time limit, where communication and teamwork skills were essential for the success of the team. Among the key results, we can highlight the fact that as most of the participants were taking part on their first escape room, the results that we got come from a sample of participants who were getting their first contact with these methodologies, and most of them were able to complete the activity with success. Communication, teamwork, problem solving, critical thinking and time management were the skills most cited by the participants as the ones that escape room dynamics may develop better. For future studies, we suggest planning an escape room with a bigger number of participants, in order to validate more accurately the results of this study.

Keywords:

Escape room, competences, team building skills.