NICEC Seminar - Evaluating career coaching

Thursday 21st March, 2024, 5.00-6.30 pm GMT

Alison Carter, Principal Research Fellow, Institute for Employment Studies (IES)
Wendy Hirsh,  Principal Associate, IES and NICEC Fellow

Alison and Wendy explored the topic of evaluating career coaching, using as an example the evaluation by IES of a large-scale one-to-one career coaching intervention for individuals working in a wide range of occupations in primary healthcare settings across England.

The project developed a model of possible individual impacts and organisational outcomes of career coaching. A range of methods were used to get feedback from individuals on various timeframes, before, during and after their coaching sessions. The evaluation tools and process have recently been refined to extend the evaluation into a second phase of data collection and analysis.

The seminar explored:

• The importance of context and the challenges of evaluating career interventions, including what is particular to working adults and to career support provided by an employer.
• Developing a logic model for evaluating career coaching, as opposed to other kinds of work-related individual support, learning or coaching, and the process of making the model relevant to the specific context.
• How to address the practical challenges of getting individual and organisational engagement with evaluation and the experience of using a range of evaluation methods.
• Reflections on what career coaching might be able to deliver in primary healthcare. 

Participants will have the opportunity to share and discuss in small groups and in plenary  their own learning about evaluating career interventions.

We hope this seminar will help us all to think constructively about evaluation, whatever settings we focus on, and whether we are engaged in practice, research or policy.