I have.

One was at a nonprofit in Indianapolis. Another was an epidemiology role at a health department.

Rejection is part of any career—but I interviewed for roles that ultimately went to people who were still students or had significantly less experience than I did.

Those experiences forced me to wrestle with a difficult question:

How can you have years of experience, strong credentials, and still be overlooked?

Being passed over does not automatically mean you weren’t qualified.

In public health, we often tell students to gain experience, earn certifications, volunteer, network, and continue learning. Those things absolutely matter. But hiring is rarely based on a single factor. Every organization has its own priorities, and sometimes the decision has little to do with who has the longest résumé.

That realization doesn’t erase the frustration of watching someone else receive an opportunity you believed you had earned.

But here’s what those experiences taught me:

My career could not depend on someone else’s decision to choose me.

Instead of waiting for opportunities, I started creating them.

I built I Am Health Education®. I became a university instructor. I reviewed federal grants. I developed continuing education programs. I wrote curriculum. I created resources for the public health workforce.

None of those opportunities came from the organizations that said no.

They came from deciding that one hiring decision—or even several—would not define my career.

If you’ve ever been passed over for someone with less experience, you’re not alone. It hurts. It can make you question yourself. But don’t let one organization’s decision become your identity.

Sometimes the opportunity you build becomes bigger than the one you didn’t get.

One thing I wish we talked about more in public health is entrepreneurship.

Not because everyone should quit their jobs and start a business, but freelancing and applying your skills on the side is a good way to make extra money.

Many of the skills we use every day are highly valuable outside of traditional public health roles.

Public health professionals are problem solvers by nature.

We identify needs, design interventions, engage stakeholders, evaluate outcomes, communicate findings, and improve systems.

That is entrepreneurship.

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that the career path looked something like this:

Coordinator → Manager → Director → Executive Director.

But there are other paths.

The same skills used to build a community program can be used to build a consulting practice.

• The same skills used to train staff can become continuing education programs.

• The same skills used to facilitate coalitions can become paid workshops and facilitation services.

• The same skills used to write grants can become grant consulting or grant review opportunities.

• The same skills used to create educational materials can become toolkits, courses, digital products, or curriculum.

• The same skills used to evaluate programs can become evaluation consulting services.

• The same skills used to navigate implementation barriers can become implementation support for organizations trying to move from strategy to action.

Many of us have spent years developing expertise that organizations need but may not have internally.

That expertise has value.

What Does Entrepreneurship in Public Health Actually Look Like?

Entrepreneurship in public health does not have to mean building a venture-backed startup or creating the next health app.

Sometimes it looks like:

• Public health exam preparation courses

• Workforce development training

• Continuing education programs

• Grant writing or grant review services

• Program evaluation consulting

• Community engagement support

• Curriculum design

• Speaking and facilitation

• Strategic planning retreats

• Implementation support

• Technical assistance

• Health communication products

• Educational toolkits and templates

• Coaching and career development resources

For others, it may look like:

• Maternal and child health consulting

• Health equity consulting

• Policy analysis services

• Quality improvement support

• Community health needs assessments

• Accreditation readiness support

• Research and dissemination support

Public health has never had a shortage of problems to solve.

Start With What People Already Ask You For

If you are interested in entrepreneurship, start with a simple question:

What do people already come to you for?

Do people ask you to:

• Review presentations?

• Explain evaluation methods?

• Build surveys?

• Develop trainings?

• Write grants?

• Facilitate meetings?

• Review resumes?

• Interpret data?

• Create educational materials?

Those requests are clues.

They often point toward expertise that others find valuable enough to pay for.

Stop Waiting For Permission

One of the biggest lessons entrepreneurship taught me is that sometimes you have to stop waiting for someone to create the position you want.

Sometimes you create the opportunity yourself.

Public health professionals spend our careers building healthier communities, stronger systems, and better programs.

There is room for us to build businesses, resources, and solutions too.

Every few weeks, another headline announces a nursing shortage, physician shortage, or healthcare workforce crisis. The conversation almost always centers on hiring more clinicians, but we are not asking the right questions.

What if part of the healthcare workforce crisis begins long before someone is admitted to the hospital?

What if we’ve spent decades underinvesting in the very workforce designed to prevent disease in the first place?

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Public health has never been about waiting for people to become sick. The purpose is to keep people healthy before they ever need a hospital bed.

• Health educators develop programs to prevent chronic disease in communities.

• Epidemiologists identify outbreaks and provide contact tracing to prevent the spread of diseases.

• Environmental health professionals reduce exposure to harmful conditions where people live, work, and play.

• Community health workers connect families with local resources before small problems become medical emergencies.

• Program managers, policy professionals, and data specialists strengthen the systems that support communities.

Yet these are often the first positions affected by budget cuts, grant expirations, hiring freezes, or stagnant wages.

We celebrate prevention when it works—but we rarely invest in the people who make it possible.

As a result, talented public health professionals leave. Not because they lack passion, but because they are burned out by unstable funding, limited career advancement, politics, and salaries that often fail to reflect their expertise.

This is why I believe public health doesn’t have a workforce shortage; it has a retention and investment crisis.

We continue to educate through public health schools across the country. We recruit people who are passionate about improving health outcomes. But too often, we fail to create the conditions that allow them to build sustainable careers.

When prevention is underfunded, the work shifts.

Instead of preventing diabetes, we pay to manage its complications.

Instead of addressing housing conditions that contribute to asthma, we pay for emergency department visits.

Instead of investing in maternal and child health programs, we pay for preventable complications during pregnancy and infancy.

Instead of strengthening behavioral health and community support systems, we rely on emergency care to address crises that could have been prevented or mitigated.

Healthcare professionals, especially nurses, shoulder much of this burden. The solution isn’t fewer nurses. Nurses are indispensable to our healthcare system.

Imagine if prevention received the same long-term investment as treatment.

Imagine if public health agencies offered competitive salaries, stable funding, clear career pathways, and opportunities for professional growth.

Imagine if we measured success not only by how well we treated disease, but by how effectively we prevented it.

The return on investment would extend far beyond public health departments. It would reduce strain on hospitals, improve community health outcomes, lower healthcare costs, and create a stronger, more resilient workforce across the entire health system.

Every vacant public health position represents prevention that isn’t happening.

That’s not simply a workforce issue.

It’s a systems issue.

The future of healthcare doesn’t begin in the hospital.

It begins with investing in public health.

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I was recently asked a simple but thought-provoking question:

Where are organizations seeing the greatest need right now: workforce development, organizational capacity building, or securing partnerships and resources?

My answer was immediate: workforce development and organizational capacity building are so closely connected that it’s often difficult to separate them.

Across public health, healthcare, education, nonprofits, and government agencies, organizations are being asked to do more than ever before. They are responding to workforce shortages, staff burnout, increasing community needs, funding constraints, and growing expectations for measurable impact.

In response, many organizations focus on workforce development. They invest in training, professional development, recruitment, and retention efforts. These investments are important and necessary.

However, workforce development alone is not enough.

A highly skilled workforce still needs strong systems, clear processes, effective leadership, sustainable funding, meaningful partnerships, and supportive infrastructure to succeed. Without those elements, even the most talented teams can struggle to maintain momentum.

The reverse is also true. Organizations can have sophisticated systems and well-designed structures, but without a capable and supported workforce, those systems cannot achieve their intended outcomes.

This is why I believe the conversation should shift from choosing between workforce development and capacity building to understanding how they work together.

Capacity building creates the environment where people can thrive.

Workforce development equips people with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to perform effectively within that environment.

One without the other creates limitations.

When organizations intentionally invest in both, they are better positioned to:

• Improve employee retention

• Reduce burnout

• Strengthen program delivery

• Increase community impact

• Sustain long-term growth

• Adapt to changing needs

• The most successful organizations are not asking, “Which should we prioritize?”

They are asking:

How can we build organizational capacity in a way that strengthens our workforce and supports sustainable impact?

That is where meaningful and lasting change begins.

A degree is not the finish line.

A certification is not the finish line.

Landing the job is not the finish line.

One of the biggest misconceptions about professional development is that learning ends once we become “qualified.” In reality, the most effective professionals are often the ones who remain students throughout their careers.

Public health is a perfect example.

The field is constantly evolving. New health threats emerge. Policies change. Technologies advance. Communities face different challenges than they did even a few years ago.

Today, public health professionals are being asked to understand artificial intelligence, address workforce shortages, navigate misinformation, support mental health, respond to climate-related health impacts, and strengthen trust within communities.

Many of these topics were not central to public health education just a decade ago.

That is why professional development matters.

Not because we need another certificate.

Not because we need to collect continuing education credits.

But because the people and communities we serve deserve professionals who continue to grow.

Throughout my career, some of my greatest learning experiences have happened outside of formal education. They happened through difficult projects, unexpected career transitions, professional conversations, training opportunities, and moments that forced me to adapt.

Learning is not always comfortable.

Sometimes it requires us to admit we do not know something.

Sometimes it requires us to challenge long-held assumptions.

Sometimes it means learning entirely new skills in response to a changing world.

But growth rarely happens without it.

Whether you are a student, a new professional, or someone with decades of experience, there is always another skill to develop, another perspective to understand, and another opportunity to learn.

Public health does not stand still.

Neither should we.

What are you learning right now?

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Nakia Bolden, MPH, CHES® is a public health educator, consultant, and founder of I Am Health Education®. She writes about public health, health equity, workforce development, career growth, and what it really takes to create healthier communities and a sustainable career in the field.

For a long time, I focused on what happened to me.

Now I’m spending more time thinking about what I can learn from it.

One lesson stands out.

Earlier in my career, I worked in government. Like many public health professionals, I was surrounded by people carrying frustration, burnout, and workplace trauma from years of navigating bureaucracy, limited resources, and difficult leadership situations.

Without realizing it, I started viewing my own workplace relationships through their experiences instead of my own.

I projected other people’s battles onto situations that were not actually my battles to fight.

Looking back, there were times I pushed back against leadership not because of a direct issue I was experiencing, but because I had absorbed the concerns and frustrations of others.

That’s a difficult thing to admit.

The next lesson came later.

As I became more visible professionally, I started building outside projects. I posted on LinkedIn. I shared ideas. I created networking opportunities like Public Health Coffee Chats. I talked about entrepreneurship and side projects.

My intention was never to compete with my employer.

I wasn’t soliciting clients.

I wasn’t sharing confidential information.

I wasn’t trying to leave my job.

I was trying to build community.

But intentions and perceptions are not always the same thing.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that when you’re employed, especially in consulting or corporate environments, visibility outside of work can be interpreted differently than you expect.

Fair or unfair, leaders may view side projects, public visibility, and entrepreneurial activities through a different lens than the person creating them.

Today, I think more carefully about professional boundaries, how my actions may be perceived, and whether every idea needs to be publicly shared in real time.

None of this means I regret building community.

None of this means I regret supporting public health professionals.

But I do understand now that every professional decision comes with tradeoffs.

The biggest lesson from this chapter is simple:

Not every battle is yours to fight.

Not every opportunity needs to be announced.

And sometimes the most important growth comes from honestly examining your own role in the story.

That’s what I’m doing now.

Not because I’m dwelling on the past.

Because I’m preparing for what’s next.💙💙💙

More specifically, I wanted to be the person everyone called during the next mysterious disease outbreak. I imagined myself uncovering the source of a deadly virus, leading investigations, and helping communities navigate public health crises. In my mind, public health was action, urgency, and impact.

That dream is what led me to pursue a career in public health.

Years later, I found myself working on the COVID-19 response.

Ironically, I had achieved the very thing that inspired me to enter the field. I was part of a historic public health response that affected millions of people.

Yet the experience wasn’t what I expected.

The reality was less about being in the field and more about being behind a computer. There were datasets to clean, reports to complete, and endless information to review. While those tasks were important, they didn’t align with the version of public health I had imagined as a child.

So I pivoted.

I explored epidemiology more deeply, believing it would bring me closer to the work I envisioned. Instead, I learned that epidemiologists spend much of their time analyzing and managing data rather than conducting dramatic outbreak investigations.

Then I shifted into community health.

I collaborated with organizations, worked on chronic disease prevention efforts, addressed cancer disparities, and proposed initiatives focused on food insecurity. I believed I had found a space where I could create meaningful change.

But I quickly discovered another reality of public health.

Having a good idea and implementing a good idea are two very different things.

Funding limitations, competing priorities, organizational structures, and political considerations often determine what gets done. I proposed programs that I believed could improve health outcomes, only to encounter barriers, delays, and resistance.

So I pivoted again.

I moved toward policy, believing that if implementation was difficult, perhaps influencing systems would create greater impact.

What I found was that policy consulting wasn’t always the policy work I had imagined.

Instead of shaping legislation or influencing major public health decisions, much of the work involved navigating organizational priorities, stakeholder interests, and processes that often felt removed from the communities those decisions would ultimately affect.

Along the way, I frequently found myself as the youngest person in the room.

Sometimes I was the only person in the room who looked like me.

I was encouraged to speak up, share ideas, and challenge assumptions. Yet when I did, those conversations often led to more conversations, more meetings, and more scrutiny rather than meaningful action.

It was frustrating.

At times, it was exhausting.

And if I’m being honest, it made me question whether I was pursuing the right career at all.

Then something occurred to me recently.

Every time I became disappointed, I didn’t leave public health.

I simply looked for another way to contribute.

I’ve worked in nonprofit organizations.

I’ve worked in healthcare.

I’ve worked in government.

I’ve worked in consulting.

I’ve worked in academia.

I’ve contributed to public health initiatives focused on chronic disease prevention, cancer disparities, food insecurity, workforce development, health equity, and health policy.

Maybe the story isn’t that I haven’t found my place in public health.

Maybe the story is that public health is much bigger than the version I imagined as a child.

When I look back, one thing has remained consistent throughout my career.

I enjoy teaching.

I enjoy mentoring.

I enjoy helping people understand complex concepts.

I enjoy translating information into something practical and actionable.

I enjoy helping organizations build the knowledge, skills, and capacity needed to improve community health.

Academia has always felt different.

It has always felt right.

Perhaps because teaching allows me to share not only what I’ve learned, but also the realities of the field that aren’t always discussed in textbooks or classrooms.

The reality that change is slow.

The reality that evidence alone is not enough.

The reality that leadership, funding, relationships, and systems all influence outcomes.

The reality that public health is often messy, complicated, and imperfect.

But also incredibly important.

For a long time, I thought I was chasing a specific career.

Now I realize I was chasing impact.

And impact can take many forms.

Sometimes it looks like responding to a public health emergency.

Other times it looks like preparing the next generation of professionals to respond when that emergency arrives.

While my vision of a public health career has evolved over the years, my commitment to improving health outcomes has not. Today, I focus on public health education, workforce development, and helping organizations build the capacity needed to create meaningful change. Through teaching, training, and consulting, I continue to support the public health workforce and the communities it serves—just in a different way than I imagined as a child.

Maybe that’s not settling.

Maybe that’s growth.

In this audio reflection, I talk about advocating for yourself, protecting your voice, and remembering your value even when systems fail to recognize it. Public health professionals carry so much responsibility behind the scenes, from shaping policy to improving community outcomes, and yet many are navigating environments that leave them exhausted, unseen, or questioning their next steps.

Whether you’re searching for a new opportunity, considering a pivot, taking a break, or simply trying to survive where you are right now, know this: your voice matters. Your work matters. And public health deserves to be valued at the same level as traditional healthcare because prevention, policy, education, and community impact save lives every single day.

Keep showing up. Keep advocating for yourself. And keep smiling through it all.

#PublicHealth #HealthEquity #WorkforceDevelopment #PublicHealthCareers #PopulationHealth #HealthcarePolicy #PublicHealthLeadership #CommunityHealth #MentalHealth #PublicHealthWorkforce

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I started this because there are things no one says out loud—the elephant in the room we all ignore.

Like how your job title doesn’t match what you actually do.

Or how you can be “in the room” and still feel overlooked.

Or how burnout doesn’t always come from working too hard—but from being underutilized.

I’ve worked in healthcare and public health for years, and one thing is clear:

There’s a gap between the systems in place… and the reality for many public health, health policy, and health promotion professionals.

So this space is for that.

Not just policy.

Not just workforce conversations.

But the real side of building a career that actually aligns—with your skills, your values, and your life.

If you’ve ever thought:

“Is this really it?”

You’re in the right place. 💙

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(But trust us on the “subscribe” buttons!)