ABOUT

Nacro Education offers young people who don't fit into mainstream education and training, an opportunity to develop skills they need to go into further education or employment. Adapt worked with Nacro, to develop an Emotion AI-based video tutorial format called Adaptive Media and evaluate its effectiveness with a disadvantaged group of young adult learners to help them overcome specific soft skills barriers they consistently encounter at job interviews. These young adults often have low esteem and lack confidence. Many of them have personal, social and mental health problems and often lack self-confidence and the soft skills that are identified as critical, in the current and future job market.

The focus of the project, which was funded by Innovate UK, is to prepare young adults for a job interview, sharpening up the learner's self-awareness, boosting their confidence and developing their emotional intelligence, giving them all they need to give their best possible interview. The Adaptive-Media Interview Coach provides a unique combination of emotion AI and immersive interactive video with soft skills expertise to create a new adaptive method for screen-based learning. Not to be confused with facial recognition, our face analysis algorithm works within the browser, on the ‘edge’ as opposed to being on a server. This means that there is there is no filming, no recording, no need to send personal data to server and it is fully GDPR compliant. Fully anonymised user data was used to validate the performance of the innovation, along with assessment from a soft skills training professional.

The learning experience section involves the student interacting with the characters onscreen as various scenarios are presented (Welcome / What to Say / Getting Ready). Interactive tutorials show learners what to say in interviews and how to prepare for one. Interviewees answer questions in different ways. They learn by answering questions and choosing which option is the best way to get the job. The learning video content scenarios were developed based upon interviews with real students, tutors and employers.

After the learning students enter an interview training simulator section, which uses the device’s camera to look at the learner, just like a real-life interviewer would. Our key innovation combines interactive video, with a live window for the user to see themselves and an innovative real-time feedback positivity and attention ‘bar’ feature to complete the feedback loop for the student. This provides them to get real-time guidance on looking positive and paying attention, crucial to a successful interview. By visualizing projecting confidence, it also helps the student feel more confident over time.

The prototype was piloted in two Nacro Learning Centres, with students aged 16-19. There was also recorded a 54% increase in the quality of answers to the interview questions, between the first interview and the second, of the students who fully completed the Training Simulator.