Effectiveness Evaluation

This deliverable assesses the results of the CATALYST Centre of Vocational Excellence across its four delivery instruments: the 70-course Enable catalogue, the Inspire pillar (15 Business Pilot Projects, Resources & Services, and the CATALYST Network), the Enable & Inspire pillar (three Specialisation Programmes and two Hackathons), and the Centre as a whole. Each of the four main chapters follows the same internal logic — headline indicators, category- or instrument-level breakdowns with Likert-scale satisfaction data, narrative case studies, and a standardised “cross-cutting findings” section (what worked best, what worked less well, success factors, recommendations) — before the report closes with Centre-level effects at the individual, organisational and ecosystem level.

The document’s main strength is its consistency of method: the same 10-question standardised feedback instrument (n=282 across courses) and the same SME-usefulness rating scale are applied across all 15 Business Pilot Projects and all eight course categories, which makes cross-comparison and benchmarking straightforward for a reviewer. The evidence is also corroborated externally rather than only self-reported — CATALYST’s inclusion in the European Commission’s January 2026 CoVE benchmarking report, and the conversion of a single hackathon into three Business Pilot Projects and three independent follow-on funding instruments (EDIH INNOFEIT, an Erasmus+ application, a DBU-funded pilot). The report is also self-critical in useful ways, flagging a modest 19.5% overall course-completion rate and naming specific structural barriers (English-only delivery, course workload, platform UX) rather than only headline successes.

The Report can be found here