Catena Company is a firm dedicated to helping small and medium enterprises in Belgium “create, manage and communicate visual marketing material.” To that end, they teach basic and advanced classes in the Adobe Creative Cloud to upskill organizations’ existing teams.
Catena Company also creates tailor-made courses for businesses, focusing on precisely the skills employers feel their staff members require. The firm also assists SMEs with workflow automation, digital asset management, and digital data publishing. Catena offers workshops and free webinar sessions on topics relevant to SMEs and digital design. All scheduled classes are conducted in Flemish.
Catena Company is a Belgian firm that helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) brand owners create their own visual content. Under the direction of Eddy Smets, managing director and account manager, the firm has been offering digital training in-person, live online, and on demand for 10 years. Catena Company offers extensive training for entrepreneurs and employees, most especially in the Adobe Creative Cloud programs. It also provides workshops and gratis webinars on diverse topics related to visual content creation. On the principle that, if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life, Catena Company shows smaller enterprises how to produce their own visual content. The firm also teaches business owners how to automate workflow and manage their digital assets. For organizations not interested in learning to fish for themselves, Catena Company also offers consulting and design services directly.
Catena Company is located in the municipality of Turnhout, in the province of Antwerp in Belgium, which is also home to the National Playing Card Museum. Catena’s classroom facilities are located in Antwerp itself. Numerous online classes are available as well.
Catena Company’s primary sphere of instruction is the Adobe Creative Cloud. It also teaches a wide range of other classes, workshops, and webinars at all levels, including such focused topics as Design Dos and Don’ts, From Document to PDF Form, and Retro Animation with After Effects.
You can compare Catena Company’s Adobe classes and Adobe bootcamps with those offered at similar schools in your area by consulting Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me tool. With thousands of courses in the database, you can find the right course for your design and career goals near you.
Catena Company’s principal Adobe classes fall into two categories: “basics in one day” and “expert in 24 hours.” The latter are three-day classes that delve into the software in greater depth than the one-day classes that take students through the basics of After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, and Adobe XD. Emphasis in these classes is on immediately applicable practical knowledge.
At the end of the day, students in the basics After Effects course will be able to create basic title, text, and shape animation. The class covers topics such as keyframes and parenting as well. The one-day Premiere Pro class is similarly packed with practical information and teaches students how to build sequences, use the editing tool and sound panel, and get started with color correction. The Photoshop class teaches students to work with layers, formats, and resolution, while the InDesign introduction teaches students to create simple page layouts by working with type, tables, and some easy styles. The other one-day classes are similarly elementary yet packed with information.
The 24-hour classes run for three non-consecutive eight-hour days, and students can choose instruction in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. The InDesign class teaches students how to create professional layouts, working with tables, nested styles, paragraph formatting, colors, master pages, and conditional text. After clocking 24 hours of class time, students in the Premiere Pro class will have learned the basics of video editing as well as advanced topics such as working with audio, color correction, and subtitles. The After Effects class covers mapping, parenting, and plug-ins (including Cineware and Cinema 4D Lite). The other 24-hour classes adhere to the same pattern.
Catena Company also teaches more advanced classes and workshops. For example, InDesign – The Next Level teaches advanced use of styles, the artistic possibilities of the software, and how to work with scripts. InDesign Expert Tricks & Tips is another one-day class covering working with master pages and kerning and using the software in conjunction with Excel and Word. There is even an InDesign refresher class that takes experienced users back to the basics while simultaneously teaching some advanced tricks of the trade. These “The Next Level, ” “Expert Tricks and Tips, ” and refresher classes are generally available for the other programs in the Adobe Creative Cloud as well.
Catena Company teaches both online and in-person classes, with Flemish as the language of instruction. The online classes may be taken live online or on demand. The in-person classes are taught at Catena’s location in Antwerp at the Blairon Campus commercial center.
In addition to its regularly scheduled classes, Catena Company can arrange tailor-made programs for its clients. The organization estimates that 85% of the classes that it runs are bespoke, designed to target exactly the areas in which a client’s staff needs to be upskilled. These tailor-made classes may be arranged in Flemish, French, or English.
Admission to the regularly scheduled classes is open enrollment. Catena Company representatives guide interested students and businesses to the right class or assist in creating a customized curriculum for corporate and bespoke training.
One-day classes at Catena Company are each priced at €445 (approximately $460), exclusive of 21% VAT (value-added tax). The three-day classes carry a proportional price tag of €1,335 (approximately $1,380).
Class fees are eligible for Flanders’ KMO Portefeuille subsidy, which will cover 30% of the price of tuition for small businesses and 20% of the tuition for medium-sized enterprises.
Because Catena Company’s classes are directed at employed professionals, no career services are offered. Instead, the organization offers consulting for businesses looking to boost their brand recognition and sales.
As a professional training organization rather than a career-changing school, Catena Company does not report student graduation or employment rates. Although figures are limited, Catena reports that 95% of its attendees consider themselves satisfied with their study experience.
Although the reviews quoted on Catena Company’s website can’t be assumed to be entirely unbiased or completely representative, they offer some insight into the student experience in the organization’s classes. Graduates of Catena Company classes describe intensive learning experiences and thorough coverage of the program learned in the course. One student remarked that “to master Illustrator in one day is a little like letting an elephant loose in a china shop, but I learned a lot.” The theme of significant learning carries through other testimonials on class activities and instructors: one client said that they “learned a lot thanks to the homework assignments, ” while another described their course of study as “very rich in information and tips with a top teacher.”
Meanwhile, Catena’s lone Facebook review shares appreciation for the format of the organization’s “very cool and interesting webinars, ” especially for the fact that, with “no wasted talk, ” the experience was “time well spent.”
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