by Charlie Tulloch

As we move into 2021 after an interrupted 2020, it is a good time to reflect on the place of evaluators in the working world. It is clear that many sectors and vocations have been forced to significantly upscale, downscale or adapt to changing economic and global circumstances.

Fortunately for us, there remains a central role for evaluation to play in the face of increasing challenges, demanding an ongoing need for analysis of policy and program successes and failures. Indeed, evaluators now face an increasingly diverse set of choices when it comes to defining their career directions.

The final Australian Evaluation Society's Victorian seminar of 2020 explored this topic in depth, drawing on the wisdom and experiences of six fantastic evaluators of different ages, genders, study backgrounds and vocational sectors (academia, private, government, international development, philanthropy). This article reflects on the insights from this session.

by Aneta Cram, Francesca Demetriou and Eunice Sotelo

We’ve heard it time and again: people don’t necessarily set out to be evaluators, but fall into the field. For those of us relatively new or emerging, this can be confusing to navigate.

As three self-identified early career evaluators (ECEs), who also grapple with what it means to be ‘early career’ or ‘emerging’, we were interested to learn more about how ECEs orient themselves, set their career pathway, and build their evaluation capacity. For the past eight months we‘ve been working on a research project exploring the experiences that current self-identified ECEs have had entering into and developing themselves across the diverse range of entry pathways and work contexts in Australia and, in part, New Zealand.