Recruitment and Retention of the Public Health Workforce

A 2023 evaluation by NNPHI focused on entry level professionals through listening sessions and surveys. Findings highlight the need for improving academic and workforce alignment, person-centered recruitment and retention as well as developing workforce pathways.

Barriers Entering Workforce

Barriers faced by listening session participants when trying to find a job in public health included accessibility and pay, level of experience did not match entry level positions, lack of credentials, lack of networking and lack of existing network to take advantage of.

A Guide for Supporting the Public Health Workforce

Resource Guide: Enhancing Recruitment, Retention, Communication and Coping with Rejection in the Workforce
To address the challenges of recruitment, retention, communication strategies and coping with rejection, NNPHI’s Climate and Crisis Preparedness team partnered with a health communications consultant to analyze insights from listening sessions. These sessions uncovered key barriers, and in response, we developed a practical handbook designed to support professionals in overcoming these hurdles.

What’s Inside the Handbook:

• Part 1: Framework Development and Intervention Strategies
  Using three proven models—the Career Lifecycle Model, the People, Processes, and Products (PPP) Model, and the Essentials Model—to create a unified framework. This section provides step-by-step guidance and discussion prompts, helping users apply these models in their professional settings.
• Part 2: Addressing Pain Points with Use Cases and Examples
  Dive deeper into common pain points and explore real-world use cases and examples. This section equips professionals with practical tools to tackle challenges in recruitment, retention, communication, and managing rejection.

This guide is a vital tool for professionals navigating workforce challenges—helping to build more resilient teams and stronger communication practices.

Read Handbook

Centering Workforce Conversations

In the Fall of 2023, NNPHI embarked on an exploratory evaluation into the constructs of data science and leadership within the next generation of the public health workforce. A series of three listening sessions with pre- and post- participation surveys captured participants’ narratives about their academic and training experiences entering the workforce.

Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, the evaluation sought to: 1) understand the key concepts of public health data science and leadership for entry-level professionals, 2) identify gaps and needs for data science and leadership in the current workforce capacity, accessibility, training, and education, 3) detect ways that systems undermine efforts to create a more diverse public health workforce, and 4) align workforce needs and current public health programs with data science and leadership curricula. The recommendations and resources were developed from this work.