Question

1. The state board of education has hired you to analyze the impact of vocational training programs.   You are told to analyze how successful those programs have been in the past 10 years. How would you go about quantifying “success” in this case? What main factors will you consider in building the success metric? What options do you have for units of analysis?

Answer 1

To analyze the success of vocational training programs, we can quantify "success" by measuring some of the following variables:

1) No. of students placed following the completion of the vocational training program

2) Average/Median current salary of the training participants graduating in the past 10 years

3) Comparing the average salary of those who underwent the vocational training program with those who did not.

4) No. of unemployed participants from the vocational training program.

5) The average duration it took for the participants to get a job after graduating from the vocational training programs.

The above metrics can be collected through online survey forms or reaching out to the participants offline, and some suitable weightage can be assigned to calculate the efficacy of the training programs.

No. of students can be a unitless metric, and salaries can be again measured in a common currency like dollar (applying the exchange rate where required). Avg duration to find a job can be measured in days for the sake of simplicity.