Longitudinal Study: Assessing E4C Fellowship Program Impact
E4C’s Fellowship Program offers fellows a unique opportunity to learn new technical and professional skills through Impact Projects with partner organizations, attend 30+ hours of curated Learning Modules, gain exposure to multidisciplinary (physical, social, digital) infrastructure frameworks, and gain access to a vast network of experts and alumni. However, programs are prone to becoming outdated if they are not revamped regularly through continuous improvements – both incremental and large. Therefore, it was imperative for E4C to investigate the strengths, gaps, and opportunities for improvement that could make the fellowship program more impactful.
The goal of this project was to implement E4C’s Fellowship Program Impact Evaluation Strategy to assess impact, capture concrete examples of how Fellows are exposed to multidisciplinary infrastructure, and provide recommendations and actionable insights on ways to improve the program and their Impact Evaluation Strategy.
Through a variety of tools (e.g., surveys, rubrics, interviews), results show that overall, the vast majority of Fellows from the 2022 E4C Fellowship program (Summer Cohort) and partners were satisfied with their experience. Additionally, current Fellows indicated an average increase in their confidence in global professional and technical skills. Interviews with alumni highlighted how the fellowship influenced their career progressions.
Current fellows and alumni (n = 14) provided feedback on how the program can be improved, including rearranging when certain training is offered, revamping the Learning Module curriculum, and strengthening the alumni network. Additional recommendations for improving E4C’s Impact Evaluation Strategy were provided based on desk research on evaluation models and interviews with other US-based workforce development organizations.
Impact of E4C Fellowship on Alumni
