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.

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!

Making the Case for Assessment

"Running a career services program without conducting assessments of operations and services can be risky." So opens the article, Key Aspects of Career Centre Assessment, in today's NACE Spotlight Online.

The article profiles the thoughts and experiences of Mary Feduccia, career services director at Louisiana State University. It explains their assessment cycle, and some specific assessment activities that they use. In addition, they have posted some of their assessment information on an Assessment webpage for their department. This page is well worth visiting for a detailed look at some real examples of a career centre's assessment activities, including comments on what changes and recommendations came out of the assessments.


Ms. Feduccia's parting thoughts are some I think are easy to agree with:
"It’s so easy to put assessment on the back burner, but career centers need to keep going with it,” Feduccia says. “It takes an entire process and a lot of work to be successful. Thoughtful planning, setting and adhering to deadlines, and following up on identified actions to close the loop are required for the assessment process to be as beneficial as possible.”

An Evaluation Framework

As we’ve discussed how to wrangle this nebulous notion of “evaluation” we have found it helpful to have a framework to guide our thinking.

Luckily, there is a framework available, one that was designed specifically for career services, and is Canadian.

The Canadian Research Working Group on Evidence-Based Practice in Career Development (CRWG) has created a comprehensive framework for evaluation which is specific to organizations providing career-related services. We have chosen to use their framework to structure our work on evaluation thus far, and we will be using it to structure the evaluation guide that we are creating as well.

The CRWG framework is available online in an article titled "Demonstrating Value: A Draft Framework for Evaluating the Effectiveness of Career Development Interventions," published in the Canadian Journal of Counselling.

Have you used this framework to guide your evaluation planning? If so, how have you used it, and how has it been helpful?