Project description
Wanted: soft skills
In today’s labour market, soft skills are becoming more important than traditional hard skills, and employers frequently list them when advertising job vacancies. The list includes the ability to communicate well with others, creativity, problem-solving, teamwork and emotional intelligence. This makes soft skills development crucial. In this context, the EU-funded QDOOZ project will develop an innovative digital platform that can help assess and measure such skills. This platform is good news for human resource managers because soft skills are intangible and therefore difficult to identify and track. With the QDOOZ technology, it will be possible to uncover a job applicant’s soft skills early in the recruitment process.
Objective
Exponential changes brought by rapid technological advances mean soft skills such as creativity, problem-solving, leadership, team work and emotional intelligence are becoming more important than traditional hard skills. According to CBRE, 50% of occupations today will no longer exist in 2025 with new jobs requiring higher levels of soft skills. However, data from the European Commission estimates that more than 70 million Europeans lack essential soft skills, causing Europe to lose as much as €112 billion per year due to reduced productivity.
Traditional solutions such as education largely focus on developing technical, ‘hard’ skills while complementary solutions such as mentoring are prohibitively expensive. Other solutions such as e-learning platforms (LinkedIn Mentoring, Quora and StackExchange) do not provide the means to assess and measure soft skills development which is crucial to track progress and prove competence.
In response to this, a team of highly renowned mentors and software engineers has developed QDOOZ – an innovative digital platform that contains the proprietary Soft Skills Framework, Multi-Approach Assessment Model and Soft Skills Profile which enable us to uniquely develop, assess and measure soft skills to successfully demonstrate progress, attainment and competence.
We have formed a commercial partnership with UCAS, the UK’s higher-education admission service, to allow end-user testing and we have gathered enormous support from numerous businesses and Governments who have shown great interest in our product. We now need to reduce commercial risk by running large scale trials and optimising our product performance prior to global roll-out.
5 years post-project, we will generate annual revenues of €59.5 million, €36.3 million in profits, 275 jobs, representing a 20 x ROI to EC investment whilst potentially adding €4 billion to Europe’s economy, leading to higher productivity gains and significantly improving Europeans’ quality of life.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social scienceseducational sciencesdidactics
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsproduction economicsproductivity
- social sciencessociologygovernancecrisis management
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
PR2 2YP PRESTON LANCASHIRE
United Kingdom
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.