Core technical competencies for an evaluator

  Am sure you have seen the adverts everywhere looking for an evaluation consultant or evaluator.  All of them in whatever sector, field, context or organization, they always say what they are looking for in an evaluator. All adverts for evaluators will mention "experience of designing and conducting evaluations",  "Strong analytical skills",  "ability to work with and as a part of teams",  "excellent report-writing and editing skills",  "Excellent data presentation and visualization skills", etc. All this points to competencies required of an evaluator.

Several articles and resources on skills needed to be an evaluator exist, in most cases grouped together with skills for monitoring. Today, I will be highlighting the competencies you need to develop to be a very good and agile evaluator. The beauty of evaluation is that it builds on other professions with few modifications in the applicability of competencies.  For example, if you are a certified business analysis professional, you may already have most of the competencies required of an evaluator. It is how you will demonstrate such competencies that will make you an evaluator.  I will only focus on analytical thinking and problem-solving skills and Behavioural abilities. Let’s dive in.

1. Analytical Thinking and Problem-Solving

Evaluations are usually commissioned when there is need to learn or to justify what actually happened. Also, we know that evaluation is about judgement of worth or merit. This means an evaluator must have the competencies needed to render the judgement and build confidence in stakeholders to agree with the judgement.  As an evaluator, you will need to build your skills in following: 

• Creative Thinking - Ability to generate new ideas and approaches to solve problems
• Decision Making - Ability to understand the criteria needed to make  decisions
• Learning - Ability to quickly absorb new and different types of information
• Problem Solving - Ability to understand the underlying cause of a problem and use problem-  solving techniques
• System Thinking - Ability to understand the interactions between people, process and  technology
• Conceptual Thinking - Ability to understand how discrete information fits into a larger picture
• Visual Thinking  Ability to visually  communicate complex concepts and models to  stakeholders

What is clear is that these skills will not be got from any evaluation specific training. But they are necessary to have. As you build your competencies in data analysis and report writing, look for ways of building the above technical skills.  You may get most of these from leadership training, strategic management or even in business analytics. Or just pretend that you got them in your MBA.

2. Behavioural competencies

Almost all adverts for evaluators out here will specify the need for ability to work with and as a part of teams, adherence to norms and standards of evaluations, abide by code of ethics, etc. But the most important behavioural skills you will need is adaptability.  Adaptability can be seen as ability to adjust style, methods, and approach to the  environment. Each evaluation you conduct will be unique. You interact with people that have different perspectives about evaluations, work with organization and evaluation object that may not have all you had in a previous assignment, management changes when you in the process of conducting an evaluation and everything has to be readjusted, the list is endless. As an evaluator, you need to have adaptability built into your traits to be able to conduct an evaluation in a changing environment.