The IMF and the JVI: What’s New in Training Provided by the Fund

The 25th anniversary of the JVI offers a good opportunity to review the evolving training offer by the IMF. A lot has taken place in the capacity building activities of the IMF over the past few years. Most notably, the Institute for Capacity Development (ICD) was created in 2012 incorporating the original IMF Institute with a broader Fund-wide capacity development mandate, including fundraising and managing the internal governance of the IMF’s capacity development activities. As our name signals, we are still the Institute and we retain, as always, our commitment to provide our members with highest quality training we can. To this end, we have undertaken several important initiatives that position the IMF to better serve its membership.

Comprehensive review of the ICD courses and the new curriculum

After 50 years of providing training to over a hundred thousand officials from all IMF member countries, in 2015 we marked this important anniversary by undertaking the first comprehensive review of the ICD curriculum. The goal was to build on the rich set of courses we were teaching, but at the same time to rethink—from scratch—the material and its organization. We wanted to make sure that we have a coherent set of courses that are rooted in ICD’s expertise in policy-oriented macroeconomics and finance and well aligned with the Fund’s evolving work with the membership. After two years in the making, a structured curriculum was developed comprising nineteen new and restructured courses, which we have been rolling out during 2017 and 2018.

These courses represent the body of ICD’s macroeconomics and finance expertise. They are classified into 5 areas: General Macroeconomics, Fiscal Policy, Monetary and External Sector Policies, Finance, and Special Topics. We have developed a learning map to clarify progression from basic to intermediate to specialized levels in each area. All courses have in common the ICD hallmarks of rigorous analytical tools, hands-on exercises, country case studies, cross-country experience, and a policy focus. So far, the feedback we have received is very positive, and we continue to adjust these courses to ensure that they remain updated and relevant to the needs of the membership.

At the same time, we intensively coordinate with other IMF departments active in capacity development (CD) via training and technical assistance, such as Fiscal Affairs, Monetary and Capital Markets, Statistics, and Legal, to prevent overlaps and boost synergies and complementarities. For example, at the JVI, the IMF’s other CD departments offer specialized courses on topics not covered by the ICD curriculum such as bank restructuring and resolution, public financial management, various statistical issues, corporate and household insolvency or central banking legal frameworks.

Changes in the mode of course delivery: regionally delivered courses, online learning, customized training

We have not only innovated on content, but we have also been rethinking our mode of delivering this content with a view to increasing our reach and impact. The heart of ICD training will remain the face-to-face training courses in our catalogue, which we are increasingly delivering through a growing network of regional training centers and programs, located around the world. These regionally delivered courses will ease access, enable peer-to-peer learning, and provide greater focus on region-specific issues.

More and more, we are delivering our training through online courses. Offered as massive open online courses, or MOOCs, on the edX platform, these courses are available without limits to enrollment to government officials, and to the general public. Since the launch of the program in late 2013, our online courses have attracted almost 30,000 active participants. Of those, about 8,400 government officials and 8,200 members of the general public from 185 countries have successfully completed an online course. To date, we have offered 7 courses in introductory macroeconomics and finance in English, with selected courses also offered in French, Spanish, and Russian. We also have two new MOOCs open right now for registration—one of them in Arabic. 

In response to demands from members, we are also delivering more customized training, still in the content area defined by our new curriculum. This can be resource-intensive, but there is a benefit in terms of tangible impact on building institutional capacity. The modular nature of our new courses allows us to customize the content more easily to meet specific training needs. In an increasing number of cases, we are working with specific public institutions to train small groups of staff to use appropriately tailored analytical tools and models for policy making.

The role of peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing

So, we are spanning the gamut of delivery from the very large scale to the small scale. More importantly, we are not simply making our modes of delivery more flexible, but we are also looking to modernize the way we think about “training”. Going forward, in this age of ever faster and more powerful communication technology, we are exploring ways to build capabilities by sharing the knowledge and experience that resides not only within the IMF, but also in various parts of the world—in member countries’ central banks and ministries of finance, for instance. Starting with our SmartCatalogue, we are seeking to develop curated course pages to be made available freely on our website as a means of knowledge sharing; we want to promote peer-to-peer learning and build communities of practice where relevant; we want to strengthen alumni networks, including through various events. It has to be mentioned that the JVI has always scored high in these activities, and its Alumni network, events, and the practice of repeated customers systematically building skills via returning to the JVI can serve as a role model for other training centers.

The Fund is strengthening the evaluation of training impact

We can’t say we have trained officials just because they have attended a class or worked in front of a computer screen. The true objective is to build skills and capabilities. So, even as we innovate on content and modes of delivery, how do we know we are achieving this objective? That is a hard question to answer, especially when it comes to something as intangible as building skills and capabilities. But we are trying. So, our third focus is to continue strengthening the evaluation of training. The Fund is adopting a new framework for Results Based Management for all capacity building activities, and we are including training in it. At the same time, we have rolled out and published a new Common Evaluation Framework to make future evaluations of technical assistance and training shorter, more focused and more comparable. The aim is to use the resulting information more effectively to improve practices or shift the allocation of resources, if needed. As part of this framework, ICD has specified learning objectives for every course in our curriculum and we are consistently using end-of-course surveys and pre- and post-course tests to assess progress on these objectives and participants’ learning gains.

We also conduct follow-up surveys of both participants and their sponsoring agencies to see how they have been able to use the knowledge and skills gained during the course on their job. In addition to regular evaluations, we gather the views of sponsoring agencies on the effectiveness of the IMF training program and future training needs through independently administered surveys conducted every three years. I am happy to report that the last survey indicated that some 95 percent of sponsoring agencies agreed that IMF training has helped participants do their job better and improved participants’ ability to formulate and implement policy.

Andrew Berg, International Monetary Fund