Washington Evaluators Affiliate Week: Creatively Leveraging Evaluation Skills to Advance Your Career by Jarett Creasy

Date: Monday, May 19, 2025

This week members of Washington Evaluators are sharing advice for improving your evaluation skills, making career pivots, and adapting to uncertainty as many in our evaluation community are reassessing their career paths and considering their next steps.

Hi! I’m Jarrett Creasy, Program Analyst for FEMA’s Continuous Improvement Program. 

Over the past few months, I have watched the job market with trepidation, wondering what recent events mean for the evaluation industry and my ability to continue utilizing my evaluation skillset meaningfully. The twenty years I have spent working with public, private, and non-profit organizations has taught me something I try to remind myself: every organization has a need for evaluation work, whether they know this or whether they even call it evaluation. Identifying and meeting that need (sometimes in a creative way) will make you a valuable resource for a wide range of positions and industries.

I never planned to work in evaluation – my initial career goal was to manage and implement international development projects. As my career progressed, I found that each organization I worked for faced challenges that evaluation can remedy. Some struggled to manage inefficient processes; some lacked a theory of change to connect their actions to their mission; and some did not have a process to measure or report key performance indicators. My career in evaluation was borne out of practical attempts to address these constraints, years before I had even heard the words “logic model.”

Evaluation helps organizations run more efficiently and achieve greater impact, and that will always be in demand when presented in a compelling way. Below are some strategies to accomplish this.

Hot Tips

1. Don’t be constrained by terminology – there are many different positions that support evaluation work or leverage evaluation skills, even if they aren’t explicitly described as such (a good example is Knowledge Management). Organizations will often define these positions by their own criteria, so applying a broad interpretation of your evaluation experience can help to demonstrate how your skillset can meet an organization’s needs.
2. Look for opportunities to build more evaluation work into your current role. You don’t need to have “evaluation” in your job title to map and analyze an inefficient process or to collect data to better understand and address a trend you are seeing, but both of these activities are a great way to demonstrate the value of your evaluation skills.
3. Regardless of what you call your evaluation activities, keep track of them! Whether you use them for your resume, a job application, or a performance review at your current job, the concrete and quantifiable achievements that come out of evaluation work are great for demonstrating your value as an employee.

There will always be changes in the job market, the evaluation industry, and even the way evaluation is discussed. What will not change is the need for skilled staff to conduct evaluation activities that inform an organization’s strategies and empower it to meet its goals. As long as we can creatively look for and engage these opportunities, our evaluation skillset will play a valuable role in our career development.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely my own and do not represent those of FEMA or the U.S. Government.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Washington Evaluators (WE) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from WE Affiliate members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.