This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

How are you providing PHIG technical assistance?

At the Region V Public Health Training Center, we are HRSA-funded, and for many years, we’ve had a really great connection and partnership with NNPHI. They approached us, probably about this time last year, to work with them as a subrecipient of their funding in order to engage in some proactive technical assistance. NNPHI, knowing that we already have great relationships with the 501 health departments that we serve in the six Region V states, felt like it was just a really great way to leverage our existing partnership and to work to advance the strategic skills of those that are in our region.

So we have a sense of where there are gaps and needs around training and workforce development through assessments that we conduct for the Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey. Essentially, we decided to expand upon a project that we initially did in 2022 to build out a more robust and up Model Job Descriptions Take the Guesswork out of Public Health Hiring ated set of modeled job descriptions and job postings.

How are you simplifying hiring for health departments?

We have worked with a couple of amazing consultants, Dr. Heather Krasna and Kimberly Green-Warren, to build upon an original set of evidence-informed job descriptions and job postings. These tools are meant to be templates, a starting point for those working in local, state, tribal, and territorial public health departments as they are working in a difficult environment that we’re living through right now to attract and recruit well-equipped folks to fulfill roles in their agencies, and then also to retain those folks – to make sure that we are not continuously facing the turnover that our field has unfortunately been experiencing the past few years.

We just recently launched the updated set, Version 2.0, and it’s freely available. It is aimed at PHIG recipients, but it’s actually available for anybody. They don’t have to be a PHIG recipient – as long as they’re working in governmental public health and don’t want to reinvent the wheel, this is a tool that’s freely available and accessible to them.

How does this improve efficiency?

I haven’t had the ability to work in a local health department, so I cannot imagine the amount of constraints and pressures that are faced on a daily basis, especially if there are staff capacity issues. Just not having enough folks in the health department, especially in an under-resourced department, not enough time, or not even knowing where to start. Working from a template, hopefully, is going to make things more efficient. It’s a starting place where folks can go in and customize according to the needs and specifics of that agency, of that role in particular, and then the needs of the community that’s being served.

All of the templates are evidence-informed, so information has come from specific job task analyses and from input from folks that have worked in those roles. We’ve even integrated feedback and comments from actual practitioners in the region since Version 1.0 launched in 2022. So we’re hopeful that, let’s say there’s a rural health department and there’s one person who’s the HR director and also doing five other things, they don’t have to do the work to determine, “Where do I start? How do I make a public health nurse job description that’s detailed, that really gets to those core duties, responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and abilities?” They can work from a standardized template that we have, and then just customize it.

Hopefully, that helps save some time, and then they can put more of that time and energy into recruitment and promotion with that short and sweet job posting. They have more time to then work with the employee that fulfills that role to actually work towards growing to meet all of the requirements and needed duties that that role is trying to fulfill.

How many people are using the model job description?

I know that roughly from 2022 until about midway through this year, 2025, we had around 1,500 distinct downloads. We know that those are coming from Region V states, the Great Lakes states, but also from across the country. So we know that folks are accessing and using it. We know anecdotally that people have found them helpful and that they are customizing those postings and descriptions.

Why is this work so important?

Public health is already facing a lot of constraints. Let’s work smart and not hard, and make sure that we’re attracting people who have the right skills, who are interested in working in public health and serving their community. Getting those people who have the motivation to do hard but important work in the communities that we’re serving, hopefully, means that we get those people to stay and to stay in their roles, so we don’t have turnover.

Where can people find these descriptions?

There are two ways that people can access this: If they want to peruse the Region V Public Health Training Center website. If people want to go directly to the Modeled Job Descriptions Project 2.0 webpage.