Hello! I’m very happy to be at UVic starting a PhD in Educational Studies. My journey here has been long and winding and although I’m not formally trained in education, somehow I’ve found myself developing a career around learning! Perhaps it’s a character trait that I couldn’t let go of as a child or that the gratification and curiousity of discovery has too much appeal? Whatever the reason, my career has grown over time not in pedagogy, but in Evaluation.
Most of my career has been in the public sector (Canadian provincial and federal governments, International Organizations) where policies, projects, programs and initiatives are advanced to solve multi-disciplinary problems and the solutions are often societal-based and intangible. I’ve worked in a lot of interesting fields: Education, Justice, Employment, Business Development and Entrepreneurship, Health, Inclusion, International Development, Emergency Response and Community development. Along the way, I’ve met and been mentored by many wonderful people around the world and I’ve had incredible opportunities that I humbly can say have contributed to my skills as an Evaluator.
I get mixed reactions whenever I share what I do for a living; often it is uncertainty in what evaluation is or what I do, or fear that my work will result in publicly-funded programs losing their funding. Neither is a good look, but I take it with a grain of salt and dutifully explain in plain language: “evaluation helps you plan and assess whether goals are being met and its purpose is to address two things: Accountability and Learning.”
Accountability because we want to know that public funds are being used to benefit tax payers. When policies and programs are created, and which is sometimes forgotten, is that no one really has the answers. We give governments the benefit of the doubt that what they do will result in the change we desire. But, truly there is no magic recipe or map to follow in order to solve some of the really difficult challenges that we are grappling with – poverty, unemployment, mental health, climate change. It requires a lot of people working in tandem and coordinating action. The best we can do is to use resources effectively, advance actions that build on what we know now and apply evaluation constructively to help us learn what works, what doesn’t and how to improve.
To that end, I’ve noticed patterns in my work; common challenges that I encounter and which very often can be distilled down to a need to think evaluatively. It’s this key attribute, and the technology that can improve its teaching, collaboration and scale, that I will explore in my doctoral studies. I’m excited and this prospect and that I may contribute to wider discussion on evaluation capacity building, organizational learning and development and applying these skills in settings outside of evaluation. Through this work, I hope that I may have an impact on others’ ability to define and reach their goals, particularly in advancing towards career goals.