The global competition for highly skilled people has led to increasing acceptance by organizations, as a key business strategy, of the need to retain and re-train their existing staff through some kind of tailored competence development that reduces the lead-time for a learner to achieve target productivity: the “time-to-competence” (TTC). Today, the main route to shorten TTC is a bespoke (hand-crafted) face-to-face or blended course, which tends to be resource-intensive (expensive to create and deliver). The main aim of the TARGET Project is to research, analyse, and develop a new genre of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) environment that supports rapid competence development of individuals, namely knowledge workers within the domains of living labs (innovation) and project management.
The TARGET environment is conceived as a complex learning process supported by the TARGET platform, which consists of a set of innovative and advanced tools and services. Here, the learner is presented with complex situations in the form of game scenarios: interacting with the game results into enriched experiences that are gradually leading to knowledge acquisition.
With the aforementioned focus, the TARGET Project explores and integrates five relevant research fields:

• Threshold Concepts, resembling knowledge gateways that transform a person’s understanding of a knowledge domain
• Knowledge Ecology, which defines knowledge as a “living organism”
• Cognitive Load Theory, according to which a learner’s attention and working memory is limited and therefore learning processes must be designed to allow effective internalization without overload
• Learning Communities, where members of a community develop their competences by leveraging the experience of their peers
• Experience Management, to allow learners to accumulate lessons learned through real and theoretical situations.