Manaus, the capital city of the state of Amazonas and the sixth Brazilian largest gross domestic product, demands highly qualified hardware and software developers for consumer electronics and telecommunication sectors of its free trading zone. However, what can be viewed as an opportunity for the youth alumni of local institutions of higher education contrasts with the low level of qualification provided by such institutions. As a consequence, most positions either remain opened or are occupied by professionals from other Brazilian regions. Moreover, the issue relies more on soft skills than on hard skills, as the local institutions are aligned with International standard academic curriculum and cover modern technologies. Soft skill is the enter barrier to the job market. English proficiency, communication skill, writing (in both Portuguese and English) skill, among others, are top listed failure reasons in the hiring processes. As one project manager highlighted: “it is much cheaper and quicker for the company to fill in some specific technological gaps, than to leverage a poor English proficiency”. This paper presents a proposal of an involving activity aiming to address several soft skills at the same time, with minimal disturbance in the student daily routine. The concept is based on the impact of immersing the student in a systematic project development experience. Clear communicated project goal, where the students have specific roles, with assigned accountable peers, everything under the umbrella of an Agile-like software development process (derived from SCRUM) are in the core of the activity. This paper details the incremental implementation methodology of the program among four research areas, and 23 projects or project activities, involving 34 students. The results of the two years running program will also be described, including the increase of progress visibility by advisors, the improvement of students communication and writing skills and the qualification on SCRUM software development process tools and documentation. The authors mapped important success factors in achieving relevant improvement on students' profile, and presented a list of recommendations for the next phase of the program, including some obvious one, as the importance of the active participation of advisors, and some less obvious one, like the resistance to the Internet online tool due to daily meeting coinciding with the peak of Internet usage in the University.