Benoît is a credentialed evaluator. He came to evaluation in 1983 with a graduate degree in political science and quantitative analysis. He served as a government evaluator for seven years before moving to the private sector where he diversified his experience with assignments in strategic and organizational research and intervention, in market research, in applied social research and in policy analysis. In the early 90s, Benoît completed a graduate degree in public administration. Over the years, his involvement in more than 500 research and intervention assignments (including more than 100 evaluations) has allowed him to build a particular expertise in a variety of domains and to develop an interest in organizational management issues and the bridging of measurement concerns and management concerns.
Since 2001, Benoît has contributed to associative life in evaluation with particular involvement in the Canadian Evaluation Society (where he built the association’s web presence and later led the Credentialing program as well as the Board of Directors), the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (treasurer and vice-president), EvalPartners (member of the Board of Trustees), and the Réseau Francophone de l’Évaluation (vice-president and president). Benoît believes that collective action is key to the development of the theory and practice of evaluation and to the professionalization of its practitioners.
Benoît also believes in the power of sharing one’s experiences and thoughts. He was the editor of the first six editions of Recherche sociale: de la problématique à la collecte des données, a textbook on social research in French. He also published some 40 articles and book chapters. Since 2000, he has made upwards of 120 presentations at conferences and in other settings.
Before lecturing at Carleton University, Benoît taught social research methodology, program evaluation and decision-making methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the Quebec École nationale d’administration publique, University of Ottawa, and Université du Québec en Outaouais. He is an adjunct professor at ÉNAP, an Honorary Fellow of the Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University, and a Fellow of the Canadian Evaluation Society. He has received the CES Service Award, the CES-NCC Leadership Recognition Award, the CES Award for Contribution to Evaluation in Canada, and the CESEF Award for Contribution to Research on Evaluation Practice.
Teaching Duties
Benoît is charged with PADM 5442, Quantitative Research Methods for Program Evaluation, which introduces students to the creation, assessment, and use of quantitative data. In this regard, his claim to fame is to have developed a course that is highly practical, action-oriented and intuition-focussed: we spend time studying what can be done with the data and statistics rather than on the more or less arcane aspects of producing statistics.