For Europe to remain at the forefront of scientific and technological devel-opment, the current shortage of persons trained in these fields at secondary and higher education has to be overcome. The readySTEMgo project aims to improve the retention rates of higher education STEM programmes by the identification of at-risk students in an early stage. We successfully identified a number of key skills that are essential for first-year achievement in a STEM programme. Additionally, we investigated which intervention tools can support at-risk students and evaluated their effectiveness. Based on the output of this research project four policy recommendations are formulated.