Interim Evaluation of the State Programme Welcome Center Baden-Württemberg 2019 - 2025

The aim of the "Interim Evaluation of the Baden-Württemberg Welcome Centre Programme 2019 - 2025" conducted by IAW on behalf of the Ministry of Economic Affairs was to formulate operational and strategic recommendations for the further profiling of the Welcome Centre services in funding phase 3 (2024-2025) and with a view to continuing the programme from 2026. The evaluation of the ten operational Welcome Centres (WCC) took place in 2022.
Overall, the results of the interim evaluation show that the WCCs are already acting in a predominantly targeted and cooperative manner and have essentially established themselves as regional or sectoral centres of excellence for "international skilled workers" (iFk) vis-à-vis their network partners. A need for optimisation was identified with regard to further sharpening their profile and in particular improving the visibility of their offer for their target groups ((potential) iFk and companies, especially SMEs). The five most important (of the total 25) recommendations are:
1) The focus of WCC activities and offers in the complex process of employment-related integration of international skilled workers should continue to be primarily on the phase "Arriving in Baden-Württemberg".
2) The WCC should clearly and continuously communicate their core task of initial, pilot and referral counselling to their target groups and network partners in order to prevent the expectation that the WCC will always provide comprehensive counselling for individual cases.
3) The WCC should take into account the specific communication and content needs of the target group of companies in a suitable way in order to improve the recognisability and, if necessary, the fit of the WCC offer for companies.
4) In order to make the WCC and its offer more visible, it is necessary to systematise and professionalise the public relations work of the WCC, to involve multipliers and to expand in the area of digital formats. To this end, the state funding programme should be temporarily strengthened with a separate budget.
5) The development of new activities in the sense of demand-oriented development of new fields of action for the Welcome Centres should always be tested and reflected within the framework of limited pilot projects before they are taken up by the entire network.

The interim evaluation is based on various data sources and methods. The following were evaluated in detail:

1. The submitted WCC concepts and work programmes;
2. the WCC utilisation statements for the period July 2019 to December 2020;
3. the WCC results monitoring for the years 2020 and 2021;
4. the results of standardised online surveys conducted from March to June 2022 with WCC staff (n=32), representatives of the respective WCC supporting organisation (n=10) and representatives of key WCC network partners (n=177);
5. the subsequent 30 interviews with WCC leaders (n=9), network actors (n=9), company representatives (n=6) and international experts (n=6).

Finally, in July 2022, the results were presented in two workshops with representatives of the Welcome Centres and selected network partners and preliminary recommendations for action were discussed. These workshop results were also included in the overall evaluation.