Washington Evaluators Affiliate Week: What I’ve Learned from Career Uncertainty By Stacey Merola

Date: Wednesday, May 21, 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 Stacey Merola, and I am a member of the Washington Evaluators AEA affiliate. I’ve been working as an evaluator for over 20 years now, and in all that time I’ve worked on contracts. Working on contracts has always involved risks, and this work has taught me a lot about working with uncertainty. 

In 2012, I was laid off when a contract ended. At the time, I was in the middle of a divorce with a five-year-old son. What did I do? I started my own business because that best aligned with my priorities of having flexibility to work at home (remember, this was before the COVID-19 pandemic!) and be available for my son. 

I didn’t know anything about setting up a business, accounting, or building a website, but I knew how to write proposals – AND I knew that I could learn these other things. As a business owner, I have worked on contracts for large corporations, non-profits, and even the federal government. If I hadn’t been laid off, I might never have met all the dedicated professionals I worked with or developed the leadership skills I have now. I was a business owner for eight years until the COVID-19 pandemic, when I decided to pivot again. 

Hot Tips

Given the uncertainty around us now, I’ve been reflecting on what I learned during these earlier events in order to potentially apply them again:

1. Take space to reflect on what is important to you. What do you really value most? Do you really want a job exactly like the old one, or was there something else you always wanted to do?
2. Recognize that you have transferable skills. The skills related to writing, data collection, data analysis, critical thinking, and creative thinking are all transferable. Sometimes the jargon is different across fields, but you can learn that. For example, I recently learned that transforming variables in a data set is called “feature engineering” by data scientists, so if you’ve ever transformed or created a new variable, you too can say you’ve done feature engineering.
3. Recognize that you can always learn new things and that it is never too late to do something new. About 10 years ago, I started taking piano lessons, and now I have played locally at sold out shows. Approaching things with a sense of humility and willingness to learn will go far.
4. Don’t fall into a scarcity mindset. The amazing thing about our current times is that people are banding together to share jobs from around the world and to create supportive communities for jobseekers.
5. Get out of your house. Though looking for jobs on LinkedIn and other platforms is an essential part of a modern job search, networking in person is important – and not just with people who are in your field. People outside your field may be particularly helpful now. Developing a 30-second elevator pitch in clear language can help explain what you do. If people don’t know what a program evaluator is, they are likely to know about survey development and data analysis.

Rad Resources

If you’re interested in exploring independent consulting, check out AEA’s Independent Consulting Topical Interest Group to connect with experienced evaluators and access great resources.

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.