The expert himself came to the evaluation in the late 1990s from organizational development consulting. In 1999 he became a member of the American Evaluation Association, attended conferences and seminars abroad, read literature in English, and in 2001 he decided to attend a PhD program in the United States, specializing in organizational behavior and program evaluation.

“A lot of people overseas that I know of have professional careers as internal evaluation specialists. This is, of course, common in large companies. The common denominator for all stories is that at some point a person faces the need for evaluation, and something resonates inside, they find it exciting. And that’s where you start a turn in this direction – searching for information, training, searching for specialists who do this,” says Alexey Kuzmin.

Elena Malitskaya also cites 1998–1999 as the years in which her work became closely tied to evaluation. “At that time, we at the Siberian Civic Initiatives Support Center were conducting our own grant competitions. So we had a need for monitoring, evaluation and training. We just started integrating evaluation into our work routine and into the work of our network of resource centers. In 2000, we held the first school of evaluation and international conference in Novosibirsk, which eventually grew into regular activities,” Elena Malitskaya says.

Alena Bogomolova, head of the Resource and Methodological Center of the Road Home Charitable Foundation and a board member of the Association of Specialists in Program and Policy Evaluation, is one of those who received training from SCISC and The Garant Center at the International School of Evaluation. Alena Bogomolova is a sociologist by education. She says she had done many practical projects during her University years that were related to evaluation in one way or another, except that it was called differently at the time. “It was called sociological support in the early 2000s, at least in Cherepovets. But the set of activities was the same as what we now call evaluation, or evaluation design. I have studied before, I am studying now, and I will continue to study, because evaluation is a constantly evolving profession,” she says.

Irina Efremova-Garth and Natalia Kosheleva received their Master’s degrees from American universities. Irina earned her MPA (Master of Public Administration) from the School of Public Administration at the University of Delaware.

“In my two years of training, my schedule included classes on various research methods, on evaluation in general, on evaluation in nonprofit organizations. It was so delicious, so interesting, and so exciting that all my plans to go into the government went straight to the bottom of my priority list. I returned to Moscow realizing that I would be involved in evaluation and nonprofit organizations,” the expert continues.

She says she has been in different roles: the customer of evaluation, internal evaluator, and external evaluator. Her work at IBM had given her some interesting insights: data-savvy and digitally savvy nonprofits are much more likely to achieve their mission, to be able to prove their contribution to addressing the social problem at hand.

Natalia Kosheleva learned about evaluation during her Master’s degree studies at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

“It was March 1996. I came across a vacancy announcement for a specialist to evaluate two environmental projects funded by IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board)