About the project

Funded by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), World Skills is implementing the Sector-Specific Employment Initiative (SSEI) in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Inclusion at Work (CRIW) at Carlton University and Recruiting in Motion. The SSEI is a 3-year Action-Research project that aims to address the hiring needs of employers and reduce employment barriers to newcomers.

The project is built on two main interventions. The first is exploring the impact of a sector-specific employer engagement strategy to increase employer awareness of newcomer talent to meet needs. The second intervention is exploring the impact of sector-specific training designed in collaboration with employers and sector experts to enhance newcomer preparedness for securing jobs within the sector. In addition to enhancing sector-based newcomer preparedness, the training will add another layer of employer engagement to the project as employers and other stakeholders will be involved in the development of sector-based curriculums, resources, and assessment tools for newcomers.

About my role

As an Evaluation consultant, I am responsible to:

1. Develop an evaluation framework and a methodology (e.g. surveys, interviews, evaluation forms, products, etc.) and ensure their alignment with the Performance Assessment information provided with the program’s outcomes. The plans should demonstrate the ability to organize the project’s activities, monitor its performance, and evaluate its results.

2. Work in collaboration with Carleton University to ensure a smooth flow of research and evaluation activities to avoid duplication of efforts. It is expected that the research and evaluation activities will complement each other.

About my accomplishment

I prioritized the results-based management approach to develop the evaluation plan for the SSEI. Indeed, based on the project goal, I have developed a performance measurement framework (PMF), an evaluation matrix, an activity tracking table, and a suite of data gathering tools (post and follow-up evaluation surveys, interview guides, etc.) to help the team collect relevant data throughout the implementation of the project.

In order to monitor and evaluate the SSEI project, we used a combination of the Kirkpatrick model and the OECD/CAD criteria. As a result, the evaluation is undertaken according to six criteria (Relevance, Effectiveness, Reaction/usefulness, Learning/Knowledge, Practice/Behaviour, and Impact).

Overall, we prioritized a counterfactual analysis approach to evaluate the impact of the SSEI project. Indeed, we considered the clients from cluster A as the experimental group and those from clusters B and C as the control group. With the data collected via the data gathering tools developed as part of this M&E plan, the counterfactual analysis allows us to identify if the support provided to the different clusters has a significant impact on the ability of clients to find a job.