Horizon Europe training that evaluators would approve of

What the training covers

Every Horizon Europe sub-programme, taught the way the panel reads it. The curriculum is organised around the three evaluation criteria and the proposal template, so participants leave with a recipe they can follow on Monday morning, not a slide deck.

• Pillar I: ERC Starting, Consolidator and Advanced grants; MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, Doctoral Networks, Staff Exchanges and COFUND; research infrastructures.
• Pillar II: the six clusters, missions and partnerships, including how to read a topic, build a consortium and write Excellence, Impact and Implementation sections that score.
• Pillar III: EIC Pathfinder, Transition and Accelerator, with the specific logic of each instrument.
• Horizontal skills: impact pathways, budgeting, ethics and gender, open science, dissemination and exploitation, and the role of the evaluator.

Formats

Training is delivered through two platforms. OpenCosmos provides on-demand training, coaching and institutional licences, so a whole university can learn at its own pace with a shared dashboard. The Funding Expert Academy runs live cohorts, in-house trainings, one-to-one sessions and live Q&As built on the Funding Expert Transformation Process.

Why it works

The method is simple: decompose every call, template and criterion into a sequence of small decisions, then show what a 4 looks like next to a 5. Participants learn to think like the evaluator in the panel room, because the trainer has sat in that room for more than two decades. Over 40,000 researchers and innovators have been through the programme, and the training series on behalf of three national agencies has covered every Horizon Europe sub-programme for five consecutive years.