7 takeaways: What future-fit skills are essential for young evaluators to lead tomorrow's dynamic evaluation landscape?

On 15 July 2026, in observance of World Youth Skills Day, the Future of Evaluation series launched its second season with a dialogue on the core skills young evaluators need to be future-ready.

The discussion highlighted that while technical competence remains the backbone of evaluation—alongside emerging areas like AI literacy, systems thinking, and foresight—it is non-technical competencies that will set the next generation apart. Skills such as empathy, connection, sound judgement, communication, adaptability, and a commitment to continuous learning, were identified as equally vital for shaping the future of young evaluators. In case you missed the conversation, watch the recording.

Seven quick takeaways from the dialogue

1. Move from measuring the past to informing the future. Evaluation has traditionally asked what happened and whether a programme worked. The dialogue argued that tomorrow's evaluator also has to ask what could happen, whether an intervention will still be relevant in five years, what emerging risks decision makers should prepare for and how programmes should adapt. Foresight, the practice of using evidence to think through possible futures, is moving from a specialist add-on to a core evaluative competency alongside methods, systems thinking and communication.

2. Work with AI, not for AI. AI literacy featured as one of the defining skills of the next decade. The competency required is critical AI literacy, meaning the ability to question what technology delivers, verify its outputs and know when to use a tool and when to hand the task back to human judgement. Evaluative reasoning, the work of weighing evidence and deciding what has merit, is the part of the process that must remain human. Emerging evaluators were urged to experiment with the tools, get familiar with them, and use that familiarity to shape how evaluation uses AI, rather than letting AI shape evaluation. 

3. Empathy is core evaluative practice, not a soft skill. An evaluator's primary role is to bridge conflicting belief systems, ideologies, and politics—far beyond translating technical jargon or data platforms.  As global divisions increasingly center on how data is interpreted rather than what it shows, the ability to hold multiple perspectives and build common ground between data creators and users has become an indispensable evaluative skill. 

4. Stay close to the work, and give back to the ecosystem. Evaluators who understand how programmes actually run on the ground make better judgements. That means spending time with programme designers, communities and frontline staff, rather than working only from reports and data at a desk. It also means giving back through sharing findings, methods and lessons across evaluations, and through building communities of practice, so that each evaluation builds on the ones before it, rather than repeating work already done in the same context by another organisation. 

5. Evaluation cannot grow what it cannot see. Evaluation's biggest risk is often described as a lack of future-ready evaluators. A fundamental gap is that evaluation as a profession does not know its own ecosystem. Basic questions such as how many evaluators work in a given country, where they are trained and what pathways lead them into leadership have no clear answer. The next generation cannot be grown into a system that has not been mapped. Undertaking this mapping, and understanding the supply and demand for evaluators in each region is an overdue exercise.

6. Beyond methods and models, human qualities set the next generation of evaluators apart. In addition to methods and frameworks, young evaluators must hone skills like adaptability, influence, curiosity, judgment, entrepreneurial thinking, connection, and empathy. While rarely listed in a standard job description, these competencies are what turn technical proficiency into evaluations that drive real action. They are what separate a proficient evaluator from a future-ready one. 

7. Lessons from the Youth in Evaluation champion. A new feature of Season 2 is a dedicated segment in every dialogue where a Youth in Evaluation champion shares their experiences alongside the panel. In this session, the champion—speaking from an academic perspective—turned the focus toward higher education. They proposed five core competencies for a modernized curriculum: systems thinking, digital and AI literacy, foresight, communication, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The takeaway was clear: universities can no longer update a curriculum every five years and expect it to remain relevant. What matters now is a living curriculum—supported by faculty who learn alongside their students. 

The Eval4Action Future of Evaluation dialogues are a series of forward-looking discussions that explore innovative and adaptive approaches to evaluation. Designed to make evaluation more influential in a rapidly changing and complex world, these dialogues bring together a diverse range of voices—from experts to young evaluators—to share knowledge and highlight ways to future-proof the field of evaluation. Each monthly dialogue is aligned with an international action day, ensuring the conversations are timely and relevant to a global discourse.

This was the first dialogue of Season 2. The second dialogue will take place on 19 August 2026 in observance of World Humanitarian Day. Register.

This article was written with AI support with human authors in the lead.