As a PhD scholar, you entered academia to make a difference. You wanted your research to solve problems, improve lives, or change society. But often, the academic reality feels disconnected from that goal—publishing papers that sit behind paywalls, read only by a handful of peers.

If you are looking for a career where your research skills have a direct, measurable impact on the real world, there is a field desperate for your expertise: Program Evaluation.

This isn’t just “market research.” It is the rigorous science of determining whether a social program, a government policy, or a non-profit initiative actually works. For PhDs in Sociology, Public Health, Education, Psychology, and Economics, this is one of the most natural and rewarding transitions you can make.

What is Program Evaluation? (And Why Do They Need PhDs?)

Unlike academic research, which seeks to generate generalizable knowledge (theory), Program Evaluation seeks to generate specific decision-making knowledge (action).

  • The Question: A government spends $10 Million on a new literacy program for rural girls.
  • The Evaluation: Did it work? Did literacy rates actually rise? Was it cost-effective? What specific part of the program caused the change?

Answering these questions requires complex methodologies: Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), quasi-experimental designs, and deep qualitative fieldwork. These are the exact skills you mastered during your PhD.

3 PhD Skills That Make You an Elite Evaluator

Your doctoral training gives you a massive advantage over generalist consultants.

1. You Speak the Language of “Causality”

  • Your PhD Training: You know that “correlation is not causation.” You’ve spent years obsessing over variables, controls, and confounding factors.
  • The Evaluation Application: Clients often confuse activity with impact. (“We handed out 1,000 books, so we improved literacy!”). You are the expert who can design a study to prove whether the books caused the improvement, or if it was something else entirely. This rigor is invaluable to funders.

2. You Can Build “Theory of Change” (Logic Models)

  • Your PhD Training: You build theoretical frameworks to explain complex phenomena.
  • The Evaluation Application: Before evaluating a program, you must map out how it is supposed to work. You build a Logic Model or Theory of Change—a roadmap connecting inputs (money/staff) to activities (training) to outcomes (better test scores). Your ability to conceptualize systems is a core job requirement.

3. You Are a Master of Mixed Methods

  • Your PhD Training: You likely used a mix of surveys, interviews, and secondary data to build your thesis.
  • The Evaluation Application: Impact is rarely just numbers. You need quantitative skills to measure how much change happened (the “What”), and qualitative skills (interviews/focus groups) to understand why it happened (the “How”). PhDs are uniquely capable of blending these two worlds.

What Does an Evaluator Do at McKinley Research?

At McKinley Research, our Social Impact & Evaluation practice works with foundations, NGOs, and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) initiatives. A typical project for a PhD-level evaluator might look like:

  1. Designing the Framework: Meeting with a client to define “success” and building the indicators to measure it.
  2. Fieldwork: Leading a team to collect data—surveying beneficiaries, interviewing program staff, or analyzing administrative records.
  3. Analysis & Reporting: crunching the numbers and writing a high-stakes report that determines whether a program gets renewed funding.
  4. Strategic Recommendations: “The data shows the program works best for Group A, but fails for Group B. Here is how you should redesign it next year.”

Your Research Can Change Policies

In academia, “impact” is measured in citations. In Program Evaluation, impact is measured in change. Your findings might lead to a policy being rewritten, a program being scaled up to reach millions, or resources being redirected to where they are needed most.

At McKinley Research, we value the intellectual honesty and methodological rigor that PhD scholars bring. We need people who aren’t afraid of complex data and who care deeply about finding the truth.

Ready to use your research toolkit to solve real-world social problems? Contact McKinley Research to learn about careers in Impact Assessment and Evaluation.