EA - Monitoring and Evaluation Specialists – a new career path profile from Probably Good by Probably Good

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monitoring & Evaluation Specialists – a new career path profile from Probably Good, published by Probably Good on December 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Probably Good is excited to share a new path profile for careers in monitoring and evaluation. Below, we’ve included a few excerpts from the full profile.Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) specialists collect, track, and analyze data to assess the value and impact of different programs and interventions, as well as translate these assessments into actionable insights and strategies to increase the impact of an organization.M&E specialist careers might be a promising option for some people. If you’re an exceptional fit, especially if you’re based in a low- or middle-income country where there’s lots of scope for implementing global health and development interventions, then it may be worth considering these careers.However, the impact you’ll be able to have will be determined in large part by the organization you enter – making it particularly important to seek out the best organizations and avoid those that only superficially care about evaluating their impact. Additionally, if you’re a good fit for some of the top roles in this path, it’s likely you’ll also be a good fit for other highly impactful roles, so we’d recommend you consider other paths, too.How promising is this path?Monitoring and evaluation is important for any organization aiming to have an impact. Without collecting evidence and data, it’s easy to seem like an intervention or program is having an impact, even when it’s not. Here are a few ways in which M&E might be able to generate impact:Discover effective interventions that do a lot of good. For example, rigorous evaluation by J-PAL affiliates and Evidence Action found that placing chlorine-treated water dispensers in rural African villages reduced under-5 child mortality by as much as 63%. Evidence Action has now pledged to double the size of its water-treatment program, reaching 9 million people.Make improvements to known effective interventions. Improving the efficacy of an already-impactful intervention by even a little bit can generate a large impact, especially if the intervention is rolled out on a large scale. Consider this study run by malaria charity TAMTAM, which found that charging even a nominal price for malaria bednets decreased demand by up to 60%, leading a number of large organizations to offer them for free instead.Identify ineffective or harmful interventions, so that an organization can change course. A great example of this is animal advocacy organization the Humane League, which determined that their current strategy of performing controversial public stunts was ineffective, and pivoted its strategy towards corporate campaigns. In doing so, they convinced Unilever to stop killing male chicks, saving millions of baby chicks from gruesome deaths.AdvantagesClear links to effectiveness - Because M&E is explicitly concerned with measuring the impact of interventions, there’s often a clear “theory of change” for how your work might translate into positive impact.Leverage - If you’re working in a large organization, or working on an intervention with a large pool of potential funders and implementers, your work can influence where large amounts of money is spent, or how large amounts of other resources are distributed.Flexible skill set - the skills and qualifications you’ll need for a career in M&E are robustly useful across a range of careers. As such, it’s likely that M&E work will provide you with flexible career capital for pursuing other paths.DisadvantagesNarrow range of cause areas - Within our top recommended cause areas, there are far more M&E roles within global health and development than the others. This means M&E may be a promising career path if y...