Washington Evaluators Affiliate Week: Transferable Skills For Career Pivots By Nicole Germano

Date: Thursday, May 22, 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! My name is Nicole Germano, and I am a federal evaluator and the Communications Chair for Washington Evaluators.

Like many in our field, I did not set out to be an evaluator. I studied journalism with the hopes of covering breaking news or even using my writing skills to become the next Don Draper (à la Mad Men). In my first post-college job, I found myself doing website analytics and reporting on the success of various digital marketing campaigns for an advertising agency, where I quickly realized…I was in the wrong industry.

I learned many valuable skills in those first few years; perhaps most importantly, I learned that I loved working with data. But I knew I had to find a way to apply those interests and skills another way. While this story ends with me landing my first Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) position, I know that my career is likely to contain many chapters.

Pivoting from a marketing role to evaluation taught me a lot about how to leverage transferable skills across industries. For evaluators who might be wondering “what’s next,” I hope this serves as a reminder that the distinct skill set we’ve cultivated as evaluators provides value regardless of our position titles. In reflecting on my career, three key concepts stand out as universal to both of the industries in which I’ve worked.

Data Matters: The terminology may change, but the importance of data does not. (In my first job, we talked about “key performance indicators” or KPIs; my current team focuses on performance monitoring “indicators.”) Regardless of the industry you work in, data help us understand what works – and what doesn’t – so that we can invest our time, money, and energy into strategies that work. This is true whether we’re looking at subject lines for email marketing campaigns or the long-term outcomes of public diplomacy efforts.

Communicate with Clarity: In journalism school, I was guided by the phrase “if you can’t say something concisely, you don’t understand it well enough.” More than a decade later, I continue to remind myself of this when writing evaluation reports. While so much of our work focuses on evidence, it is often our words that give data their power. Strong communication skills help us move from individual indicators and finding statements to narratives that inform decision-making. Our ability to synthesize complex information and incorporate context is as relevant for market research as it is evaluation reports, and this is often reflected in the ways we communicate our work.

Understand Your Audience: Communications campaigns are audience-driven; so too are many of our evaluation deliverables. Savvy evaluators recognize that program managers often need a different level of detail than those in leadership positions. Just as we draft reports, briefs, and presentations with our stakeholders in mind, so too do marketing/communications professionals – whether that means fellow colleagues within their organization, clients outside of it, or even prospective consumers. As evaluators, we know how to center our target audience and deliver products that meet their data needs.

Rad Resources

If you’re looking for ways to transfer your data acumen to the marketing and communications industry, you may want to look into these (free) training opportunities:

Hubspot Academy offers free courses to develop business skills.
Google Analytics Academy teaches you how to use the Google Analytics platform, which tracks and measures users’ website behaviors.
Salesforce Trailhead trains you to use Salesforce products and services.

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.