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The Public Health Millennial

5 Transferable Skills To Develop as A Public Health Student

Published over 1 year agoΒ β€’Β 7 min read

Public health is a broad field. Thankfully for you, there are many transferable skills that can be learnt and developed to make you a competent public health professional no matter what path you take. That sounds important right? Cause who really knows where you will end up in public health.
Here are some transferable skills you should work to develop.

1) Networking
Though not traditionally considered a skill, given everything going on in public health and in the job market it has to go on this list.

Networking is important skill to cultivate.

Simply it means who are your public health friends, who are their friends, and who are the friends of those friends. It's all about relationships. Think how can you make deeper connections with those friends and friends of friends.

It's never too early to start building a deeper and more meaningful network. Develop your network and leverage it for:

  • Jobs
  • Advice
  • Insights
  • Though partnership

Develop your core network and find people that interest you and are aligned to continue to grow your network.

You never know who will play a big role in your career development. So make meaningful relationship today.

Resource: How To Hack Networking | David Burkus | TEDxUniversityofNevada​

2) Needs Assessments

Needs assessments are vital parts of public health practice.

How do we support and help communities if we don’t know their needs? We always have to start with identifying needs to get a good picture of the community.

Needs assessments help us understand:

  • Community assets
  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Gaps
  • Opportunities
  • Stakeholders

By first understanding the unique needs of a community is the only way to get real community change.

The golden rule in public health is: to engage communities and meet them where they are at.

You don't have to understand all the nitty gritty of Community Health Needs Assessment to be competent here.

Just know you have to start where the community is and that starts with not only building trust but also understanding needs.

Being able to do needs assessments or some aspect of them can be transferred to so many different roles in public health. Develop skills such as:

  • Focus Groups
  • Survey development
  • Data analysis

Understand how to identify the needs in a community. This is the foundation to community health improvement.

Resource: Community Toolbox – Assessing Community Needs and Resources​

3) Data Management & Analysis

Data management is a skill that can help your job prospects in many fields of public health.

It may be one of the most financially sorted after skills in the Public Health landscape at the moment.

There’s tons of data out there, but who is analyzing, translating, and making it understandable? This could be you.

Cultivate how to interpret data because it is valuable and used in so many public health roles and even outside of public health too.

Don’t sleep on your data class, it has value. Learn and develop skills in programs like:

  • Excel
  • Online databases
  • R
  • SPSS
  • SAS
  • GIS
  • Tableau and more.

Figure out which programs will be most useful for you (by reading aspirational job descriptions) and build that skillset.

When you are thinking about data analysis – you have to think about who is your audience and what data is most important to communicate.

Pay attention in your data classes even if it isn’t something you ideally want to have a career around. You should know enough about data management & analysis to be dangerous.

Resource: CDC Epidemiology Field Guide | Using Technologies For Data Collection and Management​

4) Report Writing

Report writing sort of builds of the two previous skills of needs assessments and data management & analysis.

Being able to write reports or do technical writing is a must have skill for many public health career paths.

Many MPH programs lack differentiating between research writing and report writing. Though they are similar, you will need to know the difference in these writing styles.

A great way to gain this report writing skill is to start reading more Community Health Needs Assessments and other technical documents.

Develop this skill by:

  • Asking for writing projects in your internships (get feedback)
  • Reading more public health reports and technical writings
  • Be sure to be intentional in your classes to write reports or AKA research papers that can be translated to real-world situations

Everyone needs someone to write up reports. Practice writing and you will become a stronger report writer.

Resource: Public Health Org – Writing Guide & ASPPH – Public Health Reporting Writing Teaching Strategies - full report​

5) Collaboration

Collaboration is a huge part of public health.

Whether you think it's stupid or you hate group projects, collaboration is needed for success in public health.

Use group projects and other interpersonal task to develop your skill of collaboration. Sometimes you’ll be leading, & sometimes you’ll be led - understand how to play both roles.

Is a classmate being hard to reach and not active in meetings? Well you know this may happen in your career – so instead of complaining, you should try to focus on developing techniques to get the most out of these situations.

Public health is a collaborative field.

The earlier you are able to know how to work with people – as difficult as it may be sometimes – the better of you will be in your career.

Try to develop a collaborative approach to solving problems. Seek out experiences where you can work with people with different skillsets and knowledge bases.

Develop collaboration through:

  • Group projects
  • Case competitions
  • Doing homework as a group

No matter what kind of work you do in public health collaboration will play a small or large role in your success.

Develop the skills to be more collaborative - it will pay dividends in your career.

Resource: TedxSantaCruz | Cultivating Collaboration: Don’t Be So Defensive! | Jim Tamm​

In summary

Wherever you are in your career journey, focus on developing transferable skills that will be helpful no matter which career path you choose.

Leverage your skills and experiences for career success. Use transferable skills as a way to hone in setting yourself apart as an early public health professional.

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Checking in πŸ’“:

It has been a long week....and next week isn't looking too much better, but I finally found a slight groove of being able to read. And it has been glorious. Too many hours spent on screens, a good old book has been a good eye relaxer.

I also try to take a minute or so every hour to look at an object far away outside to give my eyes some relief. Am I the only person doing this?

  • There's the 20-20-20 rule to prevent eye strain. To look away every 20 minutes at an object 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
  • Though I find a 20 minute cadence destroys flow and productivity thus I do once an hour.

Things have been developing well here at the public health millennial with onboarding of our first ever intern (more to come on that)!!

How's the start to your semester going? Remember you can always respond to this and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!

Next Steps βœ…:

  1. Follow Black Men in Public Health on LinkedIn (more to come on this soon πŸ˜„)
  2. Leave YOUR review on Public Health Careers​
Omari Richins, MPH (he/him)
Founder, The Public Health Millennial

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The Public Health Millennial

Helping public health people navigate career success. Helping you learn, navigate, and transform your public health career with valuable insights. Host of Public Health Careers Podcast 🎧

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