The Evaluation Couch

In this episode, Maria provides useful content to help you transform your resume. This episode covers the cognitive processes behind common resume tips, general rules for effective resumes and how to organize your information. Maria shares three frameworks you can adopt to write effective work experience content. She also shares things to avoid using real-life examples to showcase how to improve your resume content. She ends with a few strategies you can use to maintain updated and effective resumes.

This episode features several attendees of Eval24, the 2024 American Evaluation Association conference that took place in Portland, Oregon. Maria engaged several attendees to ask them about risks they have taken in their careers, goals they are working towards and advice they would give their younger selves.

This episode features several amazing evaluators. I am grateful for their generosity with their time and wisdom.

Featured evaluators in alphabetical order: Allison Prieur, Angela Suarez, Audacity Nadler, Bijan Kimiagar, Carolyn Haythorn, Eddah Kanini, Elizabeth DiLuzio, François-Daniel Portelance, Gabriela Castro, Gladys Rowe, Grace, Joanna Hillman, Olivia Melvin, Prabin Nanicha, Rachael Kenney, Theodore Theoharis, Tian Ford, Veronica Olazabal, Vivien Ahrens, Zach Tilton.

This episodes focuses on our experiences of getting stuck when deciding whether to apply to a job or not. Maria shares experiences when getting stuck and building scenarios based on speculation have led her to not take action. She explains how our brain makes decisions and discusses some narratives or biases that can promote the decision loop that might lead to inaction. Finally, she shares a framework that can support your decision-making process to avoid getting stuck.

Resources:

Thinking, fast and slow by David Kahneman

Maria's CARE to Apply Decision Tree

This episode is a how-to guide for tailoring your job application. Maria provides an overview of why it is important to tailor your application and how to overcome barriers getting in the way of creating a relevant and concise application. She demonstrates the process she would follow to tailor an application by using a real job posting as an example. The episode discusses Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that can make the process more efficient and how you can use them.

Resources:

The job posting used in the example was retrieved on November 13, 2024 from Indeed.

This post includes the keywords results from Copilot, Teal, and JobScan.

This is the last episode in the series dedicated to healthy job search mindsets. In this episode, Maria discusses the importance of developing your story, the narrative that describes your uniqueness and the value you add to a job. This episode focuses on an important component of your story: your strengths. Reconnecting with your strenghts will not only allow you to stand out but will also increase your resilliency. Maria shares an excercise to identify your strengths and shares an example from her career to show how it works.

Other resources you can use to develop your story:

The Simple, Powerful Method to Find your "Why"

Values Excercise

Why work in evaluation: Excercises and Resources

Welcome to the second episode in our series dedicated to job searching and maintaining a healthy mindset throughout the process. In this episode, Maria provides several practical actions you can take to embrace failure as part of the job search process and increase your grit and resilience to overcome job rejections.

Resources:

Angela Lee Duckworth on Grit

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

Welcome to the first episode in our series dedicated to job searching and maintaining a healthy mindset throughout the process. In this episode, Maria explores the external factors that can impact your job search outcomes. By understanding these factors and gaining insight into the inner workings of the organizations you're applying to, you can shift your perspective and protect your self-esteem during your job search process. Maria shares practical strategies to navigate this reality.

Resources:

Job Rejections Are Causing Gen-Zers To Seek Mental Health Treatment – Career Design Lab | Columbia University – School of Professional Studies

Resources to learn about discrimination in the workplace:

Human Rights in British Columbia: Protection in Employment fact sheet (Canada)

If you've been discriminated against at work - Acas (UK)

In this episode Maria shares her strategy for leveraging conference to grow your career. This episode includes actionable steps you can take before, during, and after conferences to move closer towards your career goals.

In this episode, Maria explores why some people take action while others don't. This episode discusses the process of stepping outside our comfort zone and navigating our fear zone to reach our growth zone. She shares how she experienced and overcame the fear zone when she launched The Evaluation Couch. She then shares tips you can try out to navigate your own fear zones and her reflections on all she has gained since launching this podcast.

Resources:

The comfort zone - growth zone model Maria talks about is derived Learning Zone Model developed by Tom Senninger and is described in more detail here

This article describes the research that suggests that excitement and anxiety are physiologically the same and the power of reframing our emotions

Watch Brene Brown's TedTalk: The power of vulnerability

In this episode Christine Wise and David J. Hanson join Maria to share about Eval and Ink. Eval and Ink aims to unveil the identities and elevate the voices of evaluators by exploring the narratives behind their tattoos. Christine and David share the story behind this project and reflect on the powerful experience of connecting with others who are sharing the stories of their tatoos with them. This episode discusses how our identities show up in our evaluation work, the need for celebrating the cultural diversity in our field, the importance of considering the humanity involved in evaluation, and the value of self-reflection in our work.

Learn more abotu Eval and Ink and get involved here.

David's definition of Culturally Responsive and Equity-Focused Evaluation is from The Eval Matrix.

David also shares about the Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity (LEEAD) program from Expanding the Bench.