Guide Now Available!

We are excited to announce that the new resource we have been creating, Career Centre Evaluation: A Practitioner Guide, is now available.

Many thanks to everyone who has been involved in this project, from reading drafts and providing feedback, to sharing encouraging words about the value of this initiative.

To let others know about this new resource we'll be putting our communication plan into full swing in January, including a presentation at CANNEXUS on Tuesday, January 24, 10-11:30 am. Would love to see you there!

New article of interest in Canadian Psychology

Our guide uses an evaluation framework created by the CRWG (Canadian Research Working Group for Evidence Based Practice in Career Development). For those of you following their work, if you haven't yet seen it, you may be interested in a new article in Canadian Psychology by one of the CRWG members.



Hiebert, B., Domene, J.F., & Buchanan, M. (2011).The power of multiple methods and evidence sources: raising the profile of Canadian counselling psychology research. Canadian Psychology, 52, 265–275.


I became aware of this article as the authors cite our evaluation guide initiative as an example of a project that uses their framework. Thanks for the mention!

External feedback stage complete - Thank you!

Thank you to the career centre staff and directors from across Canada who reviewed the draft guide and gave us their feedback. We had great geographic representation - with reviewers from British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Your feedback has been very helpful.

We are now in the final stages of finishing the guide and we should be launching it publicly later this fall!

New website for evaluation group

If you are interested in evaluation in career services in Canada, then I'm guessing that you, like I, try to follow the work of the Canadian Research Working Group for Evidence Based Practice in Career Development (or CRWG for short).

I recently noticed that they have a new design for their website, and lots of information about their activities. I thought I'd share this in case you haven't seen it yet. Just click the link on their name above.

Draft site under review

We have been progressing well over the last several months and now have a draft website created. Thought you might find it interesting to see a glimpse of the homepage and a look at what is covered.

For a sense of the structure and scope of the guide, here is our current Table of Contents:

• Introduction and Framework
• Evaluating Inputs
• Evaluating Processes
• Evaluating Outcomes
• Case Studies
• Reporting and Using Evaluation Results
• Putting It All Together

Now, back to editing.

The Value of Career Services

How do we measure the value of career services? NACE suggests that a few measures in their 2010 Student Survey provide some options. They point to
- likelihood of getting a job. The survey showed that more use - 4 or more times in a semester vs once - was associated with a greater likelihood of a job offer
- salary - more use seems to be associated with higher median salaries
- increased use of career services by freshmen. Their interpretation: "Clearly, freshmen understand that they need to be prepared, and are getting an early start."

These are interesting measures. Great to see they are all positive!

However, a couple thoughts:
- might the higher mediam salaries not be truly related to career services use, but be because users of career services are not distributed evenly across all disciplines and types of work?
- why are freshman using the career services more? Is this required in any programs? Are they being "encouraged" by anyone (eg anxious parents)?

I am absolutely convinced that career services have value. To be fair, these stats are really presented as teasers to encourage readers to get the full survey report, and there may be more information there (I've not read the entire thing). However, reading this short article reinforces for me just how complex determining and measuring value really is.

Your Input Welcomed

We have been busy working on drafting the initial content of the guide. Our starting points were the evaluation framework from the CRWG, the materials the working group had created together in the past, and the experiences and questions coming from the evaluation activities from each member’s office.

We have a great skeleton, and the emerging content is looking good.

After we have a draft of the guide, we will be doing testing – and getting feedback from other career centres – which will be a fantastic part of the process.

But right now, while we are still early in the writing process, I thought it might be a good time to see if anyone else in the community has any suggestions for topics or questions to cover. If you are following this blog, I’m guessing you not only have some interest in evaluation, but you likely have some thoughts about the kinds of topics, or perhaps questions, that you would like to see addressed.

If you do, and you have a couple of minutes, please consider sharing them with us. You can post a comment to this blog posting, which will let other readers see your ideas, or feel free to email me directly if you would prefer that.

I can’t promise that every question will get answered in the guide (we’re going to cover a lot of ground, but evaluation is so enormous that there will surely be a few things that may not fit), but we will review all input and use it to shape what is covered.

Thanks in advance for your input!