You Hold the Key to Success! Career Choice Escape Game

The career choice escape game is an innovative, self-awareness-focused methodological tool for career guidance developed in the career guidance services at Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Sopron[1] City with County Rank, aimed at improving self-awareness, expanding career knowledge and understanding the 4 pillars of career choice (self-awareness, knowledge of occupations, school system, labour market) in a playful and creative way. Its tagline is “The way out leads in”, which appropriately highlights the importance of learning through experience and self-awareness in the process.

The approx. 60-minute game’s basic concept is that players are cast ashore by the raging “sea” of adolescence to the mysterious, albeit safe, island of career choices where they have to solve around twenty codes, career choice-related questions and logic puzzles locked in treasure chests to find the Key to Success and the ancient scroll of career choice that reveals secret practices for a successful future. Students do not even realise that they participate in a comprehensive career guidance session, gaining a lot of information and great experiences. The game requires treasure chests that contain tools for the puzzles, tricky hiding places, inscriptions, occupation cards, keys and locks.

The comprehensive series of puzzles is also a self-awareness adventure. The 60-minute game emphasises the participants’ conflict management, stress management and self-management solutions, in addition to offering students a clear overview of the secondary-school system in Sopron, occupations that can be learned, the basics of good decision-making and the importance of goals. The gameplay has no specific algorithm; the objective is to realise that there are multiple ways to reach a goal. The key symbol carries an important message of the game: everyone holds the key to their own success, the potential is there in all of us and persistence, conviction, efficient time management and ingenuity are needed to succeed in achieving your goals.

The game can be played anywhere, both indoors and outdoors; it requires 20 m² of space to play comfortably, although a larger table can also be sufficient. It involves 1 to 10 players and anybody can be the games-master, even one of the group of participants. After the game, a test can be taken to objectively assess students’ factual knowledge gained about occupations and their further education and training options during the game, while they can share their subjective psychological experience and lived experiences in the group through guided discussion.

The tool can be efficiently used at career guidance project days, form teachers’ classes, youth events, other lifelong guidance sessions, school events, job fairs, HR events, camps and youth conferences. The career guidance goal and information transfer is achieved in an efficient, comprehensive, interesting and interactive manner, at an age-appropriate level and offline, while students use their imagination, practical thinking, dexterity and collaborative effort to reach the goal.

This good practice was awarded the Hungarian Career Guidance Special Award for Board Game in Support of Career Guidance 2022

1]Sopron is a town in Hungary, located 220 km west of Budapest in Győr-Moson-Sopron County. The settlement, which has been inhabited since the Iron Age, is the center of the Sopron wine region.