If you’ve spent any time in the public health job hunt, you’ve probably had some version of the same complaint: “I don’t even know what jobs exist in this field.” It’s not that a lack ambition or curiosity — it’s that public health is one of the most sprawling, interdisciplinary fields out there, and most of the job titles waiting for us out there never show up in a syllabus.
That’s the exact problem Amanda Prophett, MPH, CHES, set out to solve with the Public Health Pathways Hub, a new free resource she just launched on LinkedIn — and it’s worth a closer look, whether you’re a student, a recent grad, or someone who works with them.
Prophett has spent nearly a decade in higher education, more than five of those years advising and mentoring undergraduate and graduate public health students across both public and private institutions. Her takeaway, stated plainly in her announcement: public health doesn’t have a clean, linear career path. Careers in the field are diverse and cross-disciplinary, often buried behind job titles students have simply never encountered. You’ve probably run into the same issue looking through my PHHH job lists!
Without a strong mentor to help translate that ambiguity into direction, students are left to figure it out alone — usually well after graduation, when the stakes are higher and the runway is shorter.
The Public Health Pathways Hub was built to close that gap. It grew out of the CA-ROTEL grant, an initiative that focuses on adapting and creating open educational resources for high-enrollment general education courses, with an emphasis on career readiness skills and student engagement. Prophett used that support to build something designed to function as the mentor many students never get.
The Hub is structured as a three-phase journey:
Self-reflection — helping students understand their own strengths, values, and interests before they try to map them onto a career
Professional development and career exploration — surfacing the job titles and pathways that public health programs don’t typically spell out
Skill building — developing the competencies that tend to live outside the classroom curriculum entirely
The goal, in Prophett’s words, is simple: students should graduate with a better sense of self and a clearer sense of what comes next. Not a finished five-year plan — just enough clarity to take the next real step with confidence.
Job Leads, Successes, Feedback
This isn’t a resource narrowly built for one type of user. It’s designed to flex across:
Public health students still exploring their options
Recent graduates trying to translate a degree into a direction
Early-career professionals figuring out what’s next
Faculty, advisors, and mentors who want a structured tool to plug into their own work
It was released as an Open Educational Resource under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. In other words, it’s not just free to use — it’s free to adapt. Faculty can fold it into coursework or homework assignments, advisors can walk students through it one-on-one, and study groups or cohorts can work through it together.
The Hub is available in a few formats depending on how you like to engage with material:
OER website — browse page by page and download worksheets
Mobile app — including the ability to set up a virtual classroom
Spotlight videos on YouTube — hear directly from professionals across the field
What stands out about the Public Health Pathways Hub isn’t just that it exists — it’s why it exists. Prophett is essentially trying to scale something that’s traditionally been dependent on luck: whether a student happens to land a mentor who takes a genuine interest in their trajectory. Open, freely adaptable resources like this one are one of the more promising ways to close that gap at scale, especially for students at institutions without robust advising infrastructure.
If you’re navigating the public health career landscape (or helping someone who is), it’s worth carving out twenty minutes to work through the first phase of the Hub.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.