Building Career Momentum: How Public Health Students Can Prepare for What’s Next

In a changing public health workforce, the School of Public Health’s Evalye Alexander offers students a practical approach to turning their skills and experiences into career opportunities.

ATLANTA—A public health degree can open doors to far more career paths than many students initially realize. As the public health workforce evolves, students can position themselves for success by looking beyond traditional job titles and learning to communicate the skills, experiences and impact they bring to an employer.

That’s the advice from Evalye Alexander, Director of the School of Public Health’s Office of Applied Practice Experiences and Career Services. Through one-on-one career advising, workshops, networking events and webinars such as the Public Health Power Hour series, Alexander helps students understand workforce trends, identify transferable skills and develop strategies for launching their careers.

“Public health is extremely broad,” Alexander said, “and that allows people with public health degrees to move across sectors and into a variety of roles.”

Those sectors can include health care and health technology, nonprofit organizations, government, foundations and community organizations. Within those sectors, public health skills can be applied to areas such as program management, quality assurance, systems improvement, patient access, data analysis and community engagement.

Start with your skills—not a job title
Alexander encourages students to rethink how they approach a job search. Rather than starting with a single title—such as epidemiologist, program manager or community health worker—students should first identify what they can do.

Students can begin by taking an inventory of their skills in four broad areas: data, communities, programs and systems. Coursework, research projects, internships, volunteer experiences and Applied Practice Experiences can all provide evidence of these capabilities.

Students should also pay attention to technical skills that employers increasingly seek. Alexander points to tools such as R and REDCap and encourages students to pursue opportunities to develop and demonstrate experience with them.

Turn experiences into evidence
Simply listing a skill on a résumé isn’t enough. Alexander recommends showing employers what you have accomplished.

Her approach to writing résumé bullets is to answer four questions: What did you do? What did you own? Why did it matter? And what changed as a result?

“The biggest difference for what makes you stand out versus the next person is the impact that you’ve made,” she said. “If you can quantify, quantify it.”

That could mean describing the number of people reached through a community program, the number of community partners involved, the amount of data analyzed or another measurable outcome. Coursework and projects can provide valuable examples of skills and impact, too, particularly when students can connect an assignment to experience in areas such as data collection, project coordination, and program implementation and evaluation.

Build a professional identity
Students should also be prepared to explain who they are professionally. Alexander recommends developing a concise statement that connects a student's experience, capabilities, the people or problems they want to serve, and the outcomes they can help achieve. That statement can become the foundation for an elevator pitch, networking conversations and the common interview question, “Tell me about yourself.”

“Start practicing that,” Alexander said. “When somebody asks you about yourself, especially in an interview, this is what they want to know.”

Use the school’s career resources
Students don’t have to navigate these steps alone. The Office of Applied Practice Experiences and Career Services offers individual appointments that can be booked through the ELEVATE platform.

Alexander can help students strengthen their résumé and LinkedIn profile, develop their professional brand and plan a networking strategy.

Students can take advantage of career-focused programming, including Public Health Power Hours and career discussion panels, which bring practical perspectives on workforce trends and career development. Events such as the upcoming APE Resource Fair provide opportunities to meet employers and build connections in person.

Alexander’s advice is to start building career momentum long before graduation—and to think of networking as an ongoing professional skill rather than something reserved for when a student needs a job.

“Networking is the biggest differentiator out of everything that I’ve talked about,” she said.

For students ready to take the next step, Alexander recommends four actions: inventory your skills, expand your search beyond traditional public health employers, update your résumé and LinkedIn profile, and begin reaching out to professionals for conversations.

She emphasized that building a career takes more than submitting applications. By strengthening their skills, expanding their networks and developing a clear professional identity, students can put themselves in a better position to recognize and pursue opportunities across the field.

“Your skills can travel,” Alexander says. “Your evidence already speaks for itself.”