Program Evaluator Job Description

A Program Evaluator in the public sector tests whether a government program does what its authorizing law, budget justification or grant agreement says it will do. Federal law supplies the working definition. The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 describes evaluation as "an assessment using systematic data collection and analysis of one or more programs, policies, and organizations intended to assess their effectiveness and efficiency." In practice that means a job-training grant, a Medicaid waiver, a state tax incentive or a juvenile diversion program gets a study design, a data plan and a written verdict, and the evaluator owns each of those steps.

The work starts with the question, not the data. An evaluator sits down with program staff to map the program's logic: who it serves, what it delivers, what should change for participants and on what timeline. From that map come evaluation questions narrow enough to answer. Some studies look at implementation: is the program running the way it was designed, and where does delivery break down? Others look at outcomes or impact, which pushes the design toward random assignment where that is possible and toward a quasi-experimental approach, such as a matched comparison group or an interrupted time series, where it is not.

Data is usually the slow part. Evaluators negotiate access to administrative records held by other offices, draft data use agreements, write survey instruments and interview guides, and clean the files that come back. Quantitative analysis runs in Stata, R, SAS or Python; interview and focus group material gets coded in a qualitative package such as NVivo or ATLAS.ti. The finished product is a report or brief that says what the evidence shows, how much weight it can bear, and which options decision makers have.

Where the job sits shapes how it is done. In federal agencies, OPM's June 2025 career path guide says the official title Program Evaluator has been established in the Management and Program Analysis Series, 0343, for positions primarily involved in planning, implementing, managing or reporting evaluation activities. The same guide notes that program evaluation work is also classified in the Social Science Series, 0101, and in other series when a job analysis supports it. Federal evaluators may also manage outside research firms, and the guide lists being an effective Contracting Officer's Representative among the success factors its subject matter experts named.

In state government, legislatures employ evaluators directly. Offices such as Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, Florida's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability and the Program Evaluation Division of Minnesota's Office of the Legislative Auditor run nonpartisan studies for legislators. Those studies take time: in the National Legislative Program Evaluation Society's 2025 survey, nearly 88 percent of offices said they spend six months or more on projects, and the typical office publishes about nine reports a year. Local governments add a third setting, where city and county performance or audit units review individual departments for councils and managers.

Whatever the setting, the evaluator's last job is to make the finding usable. A clear two-page summary, a chart a committee chair can read in a hearing, and a candid section on what the study could not show do more for a program than an appendix of regression tables.

Education. The usual route in is a graduate degree with real methods training. OPM's 2025 career path guide lists examples of degrees that may be used to determine qualifications: a master's or doctorate in program evaluation; a master's or doctorate in a social science field such as economics, sociology or psychology; and a master's or doctorate in public administration, public policy or public health. It also lists a certificate in program evaluation and a graduate certificate in social science as examples. A bachelor's degree with strong statistics coursework can open junior analyst posts in some state and local offices, as a rough guide.

Federal hiring treats education differently from many state jobs. The guide points out that 5 U.S.C. §3308 bars agencies from requiring education for competitive service positions unless OPM has determined the duties cannot be performed without it, and that most OPM qualification standards identify experience and/or education as qualifying. Applicants who learned evaluation on the job may be able to qualify on experience if their resume shows it.

Grade ladder. OPM's typical federal path runs from Intermediate (GS-9 and GS-11) to Advanced (GS-12 and GS-13, where GS-13 may include team lead duties) to Senior (GS-14 and GS-15), with the agency Evaluation Officer at the top in the Senior Executive Service or an equivalent; the guide notes the Evaluation Officer may be a GS-15.

Competencies. The same guide sets the technical core: data analysis, evaluation, knowledge management, organizational performance analysis, performance measurement, quality management and stakeholder management at every stage, with project management added from GS-12. Political savvy and legal, government and jurisprudence knowledge appear as core general competencies only at GS-14 and GS-15. Outside government, the American Evaluation Association organizes its Evaluator Competencies into five domains: professional practice, methodology, context, planning and management, and interpersonal.

Methods in practice. Expect to be tested on study design, survey construction, sampling, regression and at least one causal method, plus qualitative interviewing and coding. Fluency in one statistical language (Stata, R, SAS or Python) and comfort with messy administrative data are part of the daily toolkit. Writing is a core skill: much of the job is turning a technical result into plain language for a legislator or deputy secretary.

Experience. As a rough guide, two to four years of applied research, performance measurement or policy analysis is a common starting point for a full evaluator role, with senior and team-lead roles following after several more. OPM's guide lists the usual entry points as other General Schedule occupations, the legislative branch, fellowships, nonprofits, the private sector, colleges and universities, state, local and tribal government, and research firms.

Credentials. No license is required. Evaluators who manage large contracts or multi-year studies may add the Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute, and those in audit-based legislative offices may pursue the Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) from The Institute of Internal Auditors.

BLS does not count program evaluators separately. The nearest occupation it tracks, management analysts, held 177,300 jobs in federal, state and local government (excluding state and local schools and hospitals and the Postal Service) in May 2025. Pay inside that group varies by level of government: the May 2025 median was $115,920 in the federal executive branch, $77,440 in state government and $101,150 in local government, the last two excluding schools and hospitals.

At the federal level, OMB's current guidance still describes the structure the Evidence Act built. The law created three positions to carry out its evidence-building functions: Evaluation Officers at CFO Act agencies, Chief Data Officers, and Statistical Officials. OMB's current Circular A-11 guidance, Section 290, changes the paperwork. Starting with the FY 2027 planning cycle, agencies fold the required elements of the learning agenda and the annual evaluation plan into a single Evidence Plan, updated every year, built around three to five priority questions. OMB says it expects agencies to have necessary and sufficient resources to carry out the activities in their FY 2028 Evidence Plan, and it will review plans to make sure they reflect current budget environments and resource constraints. That is planning guidance, not an appropriation: OMB says the FY 2028 plan should reflect activities using existing staff and resources, subject to appropriations. Applicants should read each agency's published Evidence Plan and evaluation policy before an interview: they name the questions the office has committed to answer.

State legislatures run their own evaluation shops. The NLPES 2025 survey heard from 34 offices in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Staff sizes ranged from a single person to 85, with a median of 15 and 733 evaluation staff across the offices that answered. The newest office in the survey, in North Dakota, was created in 2025. On succession, 46 percent of offices said they are actively engaged in succession planning. The same survey found that 90 percent of offices cited new laws or policy changes resulting from their work in the past two years.

Evaluators may also be asked to assess technology itself. At an NCSL roundtable for tax incentive evaluators, reported in October 2025, Kasun Amarasinghe, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, argued that an AI system should be judged by its effect on what matters; his example was an AI model for unemployment applications, which he said should be assessed on processing times and claimant outcomes rather than abstract measures of algorithmic performance. Designing that kind of study, on a chatbot, an eligibility algorithm or a fraud screen, is program evaluation in its own right.

Career movement runs in several directions. The OPM guide notes that federal evaluators commonly exit to the same settings they come from, including research firms and the legislative branch. The skills that travel are the same in each case: sound design, clean data handling and writing that a busy official will finish.

Dear Hiring Committee,

I am applying for the Program Evaluator position in your Office of Program Evaluation. For the past five years I have worked as a research analyst at a state department of labor, where I moved from pulling quarterly performance reports to leading two evaluations of my own.

The larger of those studies looked at a short-term training voucher for laid-off manufacturing workers. Random assignment was off the table, so I built a matched comparison group from unemployment insurance claimants in counties where the voucher had not yet launched, and tracked both groups through quarterly wage records for two years. Getting there meant writing the data sharing agreement with our UI division, documenting every matching decision before we saw outcomes, and explaining to program leadership why the first-year results were too early to call. The final report, which I drafted and presented to the legislative oversight committee, showed earnings gains for one occupational track and none for another, and the department redirected its next funding round accordingly.

The second study was smaller and qualitative: twenty interviews with case managers about why voucher holders dropped out before enrolling. I coded the transcripts in NVivo with a colleague, reconciled our codes, and wrote a six-page brief that led to a simpler enrollment form.

I work in Stata and R, I have managed one contractor-run survey as the state's project lead, and I am comfortable telling a program director what the data does not support. I would welcome the chance to bring that combination to your office's upcoming studies.

Sincerely, Jordan Ellis