aes24 International Evaluation Conference

Authors: Amy Gullickson (University of Melbourne), Taimur Siddiqi (Victorian Legal Services, AU)

AES in collaboration with learnevaluation.org offers a competency self-assessment to members. The aim to help individuals understand their strengths and plan their learning journey, to help the AES continue to tailor its professional development offerings and develop pathways to professionalisation, and to contribute to ongoing research about evaluation learners. In this session, members of the AES Pathways Committee will briefly summarise the findings from the self-assessment and then invite participants into groups by their discipline and sector to discuss: Which competencies are really core and why? Reporting out from groups will will reveal whether the core competencies differ based on the sectors/background of the evaluators. The follow up discussion will then explore: What do the findings mean for evaluation practice, and teaching and learning? How do they relate to professionalisation? If we want to increase clarity about what good evaluation practice looks like - what are our next steps related to the competencies?

Participants will benefit from reflecting on their own competency self-assessment in relation to the findings and discussion, and discovering how the backgrounds of learners influences their ideas about core competencies. The session findings will be shared with the AES Pathways Committee to inform AES' next steps for the competencies, self-assessment, and ongoing discussion of pathways to professionalisation.