Everything changes
Latest public health careers advice from an evolving field
As I move towards concluding this third season of The Public Health Workforce is Not OK, I will take the opportunity to explore some themes that have recurred throughout the entire series and to review some of the most recent changes in our field. My evidence-based observations suggest that the most popular posts among my subscribers are those that address the challenges of building safe, meaningful, gainful careers in public health. So this week, I’ll respond to that real-world data by looking for some practical lessons that directly relate to building and developing a public health career. (I’m assuming that you have already read my earlier columns with practical advice for public health job seekers. Remember to check out my entire archive of articles about working in public health available here.)
Photo courtesy of Secta.AI: If you are also interested in generating some rather imaginative headshots from selfies, please try out my referral link here.
Ignore the generic advice
Since starting to write this column, it has become increasingly clear to me that we public health professionals are in a category all of our own. While the #publichealthjobs scene shares many of the painful features of any oversaturated labour market during a particularly brutal time, there are also some unique characteristics that we experience due to the highly specialized nature of our work and the legal hiring restrictions on our employers.
So my best advice is: seek out the sector-specific, skill-specific advice of people who know what they are talking about, and ignore everyone else. Non-specific suggestions do not work in our field. Don’t waste your time building irrelevant connections, whether on LinkedIn or IRL - stay focussed on your professional interests and people who understand what you want to do. Joining a general #SocialSaturday on LinkedIn can be fun, but don’t harbor expectations from quantity rather than quality of connections. Ignore the flood of career coaches spamming your inbox through the “Open to Work” feature: don’t hire a resumé writer unless they can demonstrate that they have specific in-depth knowledge of the public health sector. Don’t expect anything specific from someone who says “I have a great network - post here and we’ll find you a job!” because they are just playing for the algorithm.
It’s time to learn from networking ideas originally aimed at the business and tech worlds and to redevelop them to be specific to public health. Come join a very deliberately focussed public health-specific #SocialSaturday and #SocialSunday in the @Public Health Connections Lounge the first full weekend of every month and see if that helps you to recalibrate. Join the @Public Health Book Club and meet new people who share your passions to build an oblique take on networking. But don’t grow a huge network of people external to our highly specialised field and then wonder why your plentiful contacts aren’t helping you.
You’re not that special!
Why am I claiming that public health is so different and unique? Every time I make this assertion, some bright spark pops up to tell me “It’s just a bad jobs market!” and that all job seekers across the board are experiencing challenges right now. Unquestionably, I agree that there is currently a much larger problem with HR practices overall, including an absence of kindness and basic human decency. (For the record, that doesn’t make it ok. Stop gaslighting and google the fallacy of relative privation! Thanks @Miron Hall.) So why am I making the claim that things are especially bad within public health?
It is my impression that public health sits at the intersection of several features that exacerbate the vulnerabilities of job seekers, including simultaneous deficiencies of funding, political will, and sector-wide organisational and professional support. There's also the rigid inflexibility of public sector and civil service hiring processes that prevent innovative responses when jurisdictions cannot fill public health positions.
Meanwhile, we continue to watch schools of public health blithely churning out record numbers of bright-eyed MPH graduates, despite the lack of job opportunities ahead of them. We watch those public health graduates who manage to get a job within governmental health departments finding themselves ineligible for public sector loan repayments. And we watch those public health professionals who have managed to get a foot in the door go on to experience a lack of progression mechanisms when they try to grow and develop their careers. Go figure.
Low pay. Lack of jobs. Brutal work environments. Inflexible hierarchies. Administrative and legal regulations for employment. Is the documented loss of public health professionals exiting our field really so hard to understand?
Yes, something is very definitely different and unique.
Two tools for equity: LinkedIn and legislation
In response to the unique challenges we face, I’d like to point out 2 ways in which structural changes in our field have reverberated towards the pursuit of equity:
1️⃣The increasing role of LinkedIn is changing the jobs market. As I’ve said here before, I am a big believer in the value of LinkedIn in leveling the playing field, breaking down hierarchies and cliques, and supporting introverts. I find it so much easier to start conversations, join discussions, and even to approach Big Names in our field through virtual connections than IRL. I find LinkedIn comments and chats to be much more accessible than the equivalent conversations in-person, whether they take place in the break room among colleagues you see daily or at a conference among high-level experts. (Sujani Sivanantharajah at PH Spot has a lot of helpful advice on this.) But as you are growing your network, I encourage you to build meaningful connections, focussing on the quality of your interactions rather than the number of people in your network. Meanwhile, job applications increasingly offer the opportunity to add your LinkedIn profile to your application, or even require you to login to their ATS or talent system using your LinkedIn profile. So keep this in mind as you are developing your online profile as a professional and make sure that you really are presenting yourself the way that you want an employer to see you, consistent with the skills and attributes that will make you a great candidate for your target jobs and employers.
2️⃣While governmental public health jobs are typically required to post salaries upfront in their advertisements, other public health jobs (especially within the NGO sector) have historically not always been so transparent about pay. Now new legislative changes in NY, CA, CO, WA and beyond are requiring all employers to post the salary range for advertised positions, bringing some much-needed clarity to a market where it has been sorely lacking. I see only positive consequences from this move towards increased transparency and reducing informational asymmetries within the job market. I can only hope that these new requirements will spread to more jurisdictions; however, they will only be valuable if genuinely implemented with integrity. For example, one of the last jobs I applied to stated a salary range of $65,000-$250,000: a range so wide as to be utterly meaningless. Another ad I saw recently was a posting for a part-time consultancy asking for a 3-year commitment but stating neither the expected time commitment (% FTE) nor the amount of the payment (via honorarium) - tell me exactly who are they expecting to be able to apply when the parameters are so vague, and how this jives with their equity agenda? I previously shared the 3 required elements of every job posting (in addition to a clear job description: salary, location/remote, hiring timeframe). Let’s keep lobbying employers, recruiters, and job boards across our field to clarify these details and make sure that salary is one of the very first facts known about a new opportunity. Promoting the open and honest exchange of information between job seeker and employer is a key way to reduce frictions and inefficiencies in the job market.
In next week’s episode, I’ll turn my attention to another prominent theme featured throughout this series: the mental health and wellbeing of the public health workforce.
Join me to continue the conversation in Notes or Chat or Comments or Threads.
The public health workforce has undergone some major challenges and shifts over the last few years... and yet.
What do you see as the most important changes in the jobs market? And what’s stayed the same?
How have things changed for you personally? And what has stayed constant?