How do i start a career in monitoring and evaluation (M&E)?

Usually this is a question i get asked every time i meet a university graduate or someone that feel they want a change in career. I personally got to into the field through on job training. I attended a training on Leadership for Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) organized by Partners in Population and Development in 2003 in Mukono, Uganda. In this training, monitoring and evaluation were introduced as concepts for good programming, and a key role they play.  This served only as an awareness to know that something called M&E exists and i could easily tell everyone a difference between monitoring and evaluation. This was so easy because there was that table that was always shown during trainings about how the two differ.  

This raised my interest and decided to read more about M&E and that is how the door opened and my career started in the field. During that period, by just having a line in the CV that said M&E actually could get you an job to perform the role.  

This has all changed since then. Managers and decision makers need  evidence to inform decisions on doing things better, doing them differently or even not doing them at all. This means the skills have changed from needing someone that easily distinguish the difference between "M" and "E" but someone that can actually support the decision making process. 

As you start to think of a career in M&E, you may need to look at building expertise in specific skills that fall under M&E. For example, organizations are more interested in someone able to develop a  Theory of Change (TOC) and conduct analyses of quantitative and/or qualitative monitoring and program data and visualize them in an easy to understand or tweetable format. This means the skills needed is familiarity with a specific sector (to be able to facilitate discussions about theory of change without looking like someone waiting for food), knowledgeable about analytics  and good with communication.  I will be writing on each of the required skills and looking at how you can easily get those skills. 

These skills are hard to develop when still in school and will take time to perfect them. Analytics and data visualization can easily be learnt and perfected in a classroom environment. But that may not be the case with others. Get a training to understand components, concepts, and principles of M&E and how different skills link to each other.  Also always look at job adverts in M&E field and look at what employers are actually looking for.  

Several articles on DEVEX have explained on how to get started. For example Kick-starting your career in monitoring and evaluation and  How to build your expertise: Monitoring and evaluation  could be a good starting point.  

If there is anything i want you to take out of this article, is that employers are looking for skills. They might not hire an M&E all rounder but hire a Data analyst, Business Strategist, visualization expert (Graphic designer), Business process optimization expert, Evaluator, etc. all these are a based on skills. But they all fall under M&E as a management function. It does not always have to be written as monitoring and evaluation, for it to perform its role.