Every day, young people are developing valuable skills through sport: teamwork, leadership, resilience, communication, problem-solving. Yet when they sit down to write a CV or apply for a job, these skills remain invisible. Employers don’t see them. Official systems don’t recognise them. And young people themselves often don’t understand that what they have learned on the field or court matters in the workplace.
This is the gap that YouthSportCV’s research sought to address. The research addresses a long-standing gap between the valuable soft skills young people develop through sport and the way these skills are recognised in the labour market.
Mapping the Landscape
Over the past months, the project team conducted a comprehensive desk research initiative examining how soft skills developed through sport are currently recognised, and why they so often aren’t. The findings are striking, challenging assumptions about sport and skill development while pointing toward practical solutions.
The research combined two complementary strands. The first focused on mapping the specific life skills young people develop through sport participation. The second analysed existing systems for recognising and validating those skills, examining what works, what doesn’t, and where the critical gaps lie.
For the skills mapping, researchers examined three European countries: Spain, Portugal, and Greece. They analysed national sport participation patterns, the most popular sports among young people, and differences in participation by gender. But they didn’t stop there. The literature review ultimately included 65 scientific publications from countries and sporting contexts worldwide. The scope was ambitious: organised sport, informal and lifestyle sports, school sport, elite and recreational settings, research involving disadvantaged youth and different age groups. The sports analysed included everything from football and basketball to taekwondo, skateboarding, parkour and water polo.
Complementing this, the team reviewed European and national recognition systems and employability initiatives, not just the obvious ones like Youthpass and Europass, but also ESCO, CEDEFOP, ProfilPASS, VAE, Pass’sport pour l’emploi, Skills4Sports, SK4YS, and several national qualification frameworks. They incorporated feedback from young people and stakeholders to understand which approaches were actually user-friendly and relevant to real lives.
The Surprising Truth: Good Coaching Matters
One finding stood out as particularly significant, and it challenged a fundamental assumption many people hold about sport.
Simply participating in sport does not automatically lead to the development of life skills.
This wasn’t what researchers initially expected. The assumption has always been: put young people in sport, and they will naturally develop teamwork, resilience, and leadership. But the evidence told a different story. While sport certainly creates opportunities for learning, meaningful personal development depends largely on the environment in which sport is delivered.
The research showed that supportive coaches, positive peer relationships, safe and inclusive environments, and intentionally designed learning experiences are essential for ensuring that skills developed in sport transfer into education, employment and everyday life. Programmes where coaches explicitly teach and reflect on life skills consistently produce stronger outcomes than programmes that assume these skills will naturally emerge through participation alone.
This finding has profound implications. It means that not all sport participation is created equal. A young person in a well-coached, supportive environment will develop far more transferable skills than someone in a program where coaches focus solely on technical performance. It means that the quality of coaching matters. The intentionality matters. The culture matters.
Another finding challenged what seemed like obvious logic. Researchers initially expected to distinguish clearly between life skills developed through individual sports and those developed through team sports. The assumption was straightforward: team sports naturally develop teamwork and communication, while individual sports develop self-discipline and personal responsibility.
Instead, they found considerable overlap. Many competencies emerged across both contexts depending on how the sport is organised, coached and experienced. A swimmer can develop excellent teamwork in a supportive club environment. A footballer can develop deep personal discipline. The sport itself is less determining than the coaching and learning environment.
What Already Works
Having examined the landscape, the research team then asked: What’s already out there that works?
They found that no single system met all the project’s needs, but several offered valuable features that could inspire the YouthSportCV project.
But then the research team asked the harder question: What’s NOT working? Where are the gaps?
Many existing validation systems are either too complex or insufficiently connected to young people’s experiences in sport. Several platforms rely on technical language, lengthy reflective exercises or bureaucratic processes that can discourage young users, especially those with negative experiences of formal education. Others focus on documenting learning but fail to translate competencies into practical, CV-ready formats that employers can easily understand. Many lack interactive features, visual summaries and personalised guidance, making them less engaging for the young people who need them most.
But perhaps the biggest gap is this: very few existing systems specifically recognise skills acquired through sport. While there are excellent tools for validating non-formal learning, there remains no widely accessible platform dedicated to helping young people identify, validate and communicate the employability skills developed through sport participation. This is the vacuum the YouthSportCV aims to fill.
The Six Cs Framework
Through analysis of 65 scientific studies across a broad range of sporting contexts, the research identified 37 transferable life skills that young people develop through sport. Rather than organising these skills solely by sport type, the project adopted the internationally recognised Positive Youth Development (PYD) framework, grouping competencies into the Six Cs:
Competence – skills such as problem-solving, decision-making, communication and leadership. These are the practical, cognitive skills that employers look for.
Confidence – self-belief, resilience and self-esteem. Young people who have overcome challenges in sport carry this confidence into new environments.
Connection – teamwork, cooperation and relationship-building. The ability to work with others, to be part of something larger than yourself.
Character – responsibility, integrity, discipline and respect. The foundational values that matter in every context.
Caring – empathy, inclusion and concern for others. Often overlooked, but essential for workplaces that value culture and collaboration.
Contribution – using personal strengths to positively contribute to communities and society. The ability to make a difference.
The research also distinguished whether each skill was more commonly associated with team sports, individual sports or both, while acknowledging that many competencies develop across different sporting environments depending on coaching practices and learning conditions.
Designing the Solution
With all this research in hand, what should YouthSportCV actually be?
The research consistently points toward a platform built on simplicity, accessibility and practical value for young people. Rather than presenting complex competency frameworks that overwhelm users, the platform should guide users through an intuitive self-assessment process that generates visual, CV-ready outputs. Interactive elements such as progress tracking, badges and automatic feedback should help users identify their strengths. Real-world examples should demonstrate how sport-acquired skills relate to careers and employment opportunities.
Critically, the platform should combine the credibility of recognised validation systems with a youth-friendly experience. It should allow mentors or coaches to support validation while keeping the process straightforward and engaging. Ultimately, YouthSportCV should translate informal learning through sport into language that employers immediately recognise and value, moving skills from invisible to undeniable.
The research findings have practical implications for everyone involved in youth development.
For coaches, they highlight the importance of intentionally teaching life skills rather than assuming they develop naturally through participation. This means creating supportive environments, encouraging reflection and helping young people understand how experiences in sport relate to everyday life and work.
For sports organisations, the findings support developing structured methods to assess and validate soft skills. For employers, they point toward clearer evidence of the competencies candidates have developed through sport. Ultimately, the YouthSportCV platform has the potential to strengthen employability by making previously invisible skills visible, credible and understandable within recruitment processes.
Questions That Remain
Yet even as the research provided clarity, it also revealed important questions that remain unanswered.
Much of the existing evidence relies on self-reported perceptions rather than objective measurements of long-term behavioural change. Future research should follow young people over longer periods to examine whether the competencies developed through sport genuinely transfer into education, employment and adult life.
The research also highlights the need to better understand which coaching methods are most effective for promoting life skills. While intentional coaching clearly matters, further work is needed to identify the specific strategies, learning activities and good practices that consistently produce successful outcomes across different sports and youth settings.
What the desk research ultimately revealed is this: the connection between sport and employability is real. Young people are developing valuable skills. Coaches understand this. Employers are beginning to recognise it. But the systems to make this connection visible, formal and transferable simply don’t exist yet.
That’s what YouthSportCV is building.