Conducting and Leveraging Practical Aspects of Evaluations in Workforce Development

Neil Ridley, Evaluation Team Lead, US Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration

Michelle Carson, Senior Project Director, Safal Partners, Inc.

Randall Wilson, PhD., Workforce and Education Consultant, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration

Lawrence Lyman, Division Director, Travis County Health and Human Services Department

Heath Prince, Ph.D., Director, Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act requires states to use funds for research and evaluation activities to “promote continuous improvement, research and test innovative services and strategies, and achieve high levels of performance outcomes.” Actualizing or implementing these research and evaluation activities means understanding how they can be used within an integrated workforce development system.  Undertaking research and evaluation activities usually requires collaboration and coordination among internal and external stakeholders and program agency managers, and potentially, partnership with external evaluators.  However, it is not always clear how state workforce boards or program agencies can engage or leverage a “team” to conduct quality program evaluations that maximize learning opportunities from the effort.

In this webinar, presenters discussed the practical aspects of research and evaluation, highlighting an evaluation report to illustrate the basic elements of evaluation activities. They shared their experiences with a partnership between a local workforce program and an external evaluator and described how the partnership led to expanded learning and evidence-building capacity. They explained how evaluation findings influence key decision points for program services and activity planning purposes. Webinar participants learned about different approaches to evaluations, extrapolated lessons from these activities, and determined their applicability to other evaluative contexts. Other options to start evaluations across the spectrum of rigorous methods were reviewed. Webinar participants also learned how to analyze their program context and related research questions to determine which evaluation approach would work best for their program(s).

By taking part in this webinar, participants learned how to:

• Identify a problem that evidence can help to address;
• Identify stakeholder questions that an evaluation can help answer;
• Collaborate productively with outside evaluators to build capacity for evaluation; and
• Develop an evaluation action plan and determine potential starting points for a study.

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• Posted by: Damon Jones
• Posted in: Global