Public Health Resume Sample

A public health worker’s job is to maintain and improve the population’s health. Generally, public health professionals work to prevent disease, promote healthy lifestyles, and provide education and support to those in need.

Public health workers may work in various settings, including hospitals, clinics, schools, and government agencies. These health professionals may also specialize in a particular area of public health, such as environmental health, epidemiology, or maternal and child health.

If you’re interested in making a difference in your community, then public health may be the right career for you. But to get hired, you’ll need a standout resume that explains your qualifications to employers.

Here are three tips for writing a public health resume that gets employers excited about interviewing you:

1. Emphasize your public health skills

When you create a resume for a public health job, you need to demonstrate that you have the hard and soft skills needed to be successful in the role.

Examples of skills employers want to see on your resume for public health work include:

• critical thinking
• decision making
• problem solving skills
• analytical skills
• research
• writing
• health promotion
• communication skills
• nursing skills
• leadership skills
• organizational skills
• planning
• time management skills
• stress management
• conflict resolution
• cultural competence
• ethics
• global perspective
• patient-centered care
• quality improvement

To showcase your skills on your resume, describe how you’ve used them to achieve positive results in all your resume sections.

Here’s an example of a public health resume’s bullet point that emphasizes the applicant’s management skills:

• Supervise the work of 15 specialists engaged in developing policies to provide better healthcare to individuals and small communities

2. Write an engaging public health resume objective or summary (depending on your experience)

Every well-written resume has a resume introduction. There are two types of introductions you can use for your public health resume, based on your experience level — a resume objective or a resume summary:

If you have no experience, write a resume objective. This is a brief statement (3–4 sentences) that outlines your relevant skills and how you’ll use them to succeed in a public health job, rather than focusing on your work history.

If you do have some experience, then a resume summary is a better option. A resume summary is a 3–4 sentence overview of your key achievements as a public health worker. Your summary should focus on what you’ve already accomplished and show off your job-specific experience.

Here’s an example of a standout public health resume objective that highlights the applicant’s relevant skills:

And here’s a public health resume summary that emphasizes the applicant’s achievements to impress employers:

3. Include hard numbers to focus on results over responsibilities

In public health, hard numbers are everything. From disease rates to vaccination rates to deaths due to preventable causes, facts matter most in this field. So it’s important to focus on your results rather than your responsibilities when you write your public health resume’s work experience section.

For instance, if you managed a team of nurses who vaccinated 500 people daily, your resume should highlight that exact number rather than simply listing your duties as “managed a team of nurses.”

The same goes for any other hard numbers, from the percentage of your patients who recovered from their illness to the number of community outreach events you organized.