Why Early and On-going Evaluation of Sector Strategies is Central to Success

How will you know where you’re going and when you’re there? How will you share your success? If you had to sit down now and outline benchmarks for your regional sector partnerships, what would they look like? If your state legislature calls on you to demonstrate the impact that regional sector partnerships are having, would you be able to tell them?

Evaluation and performance measurement are much more than monitoring compliance and collecting data. It’s about collecting the right information that tells the story of your state sector strategy approach. To do that, you must be able to tell the stories of your regional sector partnerships.

This is an exciting time for evaluation studies of sector partnerships for two reasons: 1) After years of continual expansion of the sector partnership model, enough evidence is being collected to show that it works; and 2) A handful of states are experimenting currently with different ways to evaluate sector partnerships in order to assess impact on employers, workers and systems.

While much progress is being made in the area of evaluation, it is also hard work. Sector partnerships can be difficult to evaluate systematically because of their highly customized approach to meeting the needs of employers and workers. The good news is there’s already a lot of activity around capturing and messaging success from sector partnerships at the state level. That means there’s plenty of material for you to research, modify, and test out.