Community Health Educator Job Description

A Community Health Educator designs, teaches and evaluates programs meant to change health behavior across a defined group of people rather than one patient at a time. In the education sector that group is a campus, a school district's families or the residents of a county served by a land-grant university's Cooperative Extension office. The topics shift with the setting: alcohol and other drug prevention, sexual health, sleep and stress on a college campus; cooking on a budget, food safety and physical activity in an extension classroom; vaping and nutrition in programs that partner with schools.

BLS does not report community health educators separately. In the 2018 SOC direct match file, the title "health educator" codes to health education specialists (SOC 21-1091), and that is the occupation behind the pay figures on this page.

The campus version

At a college or university, the job sits in a health promotion or wellness office, which may report to student health services or student affairs. The American College Health Association's hiring guidelines list Health Educator among its entry-level titles, alongside Program Coordinator, Health Promotion Specialist, Health Education Coordinator and Wellness Coordinator. ACHA describes entry-level work as advising peer education groups or student organizations, designing and facilitating campus-wide programming, participating in coalitions and supervising students. Its sample job description adds collaboration with stakeholders on and off campus and asks for knowledge of the association's Standards of Practice for Health Promotion in Higher Education.

In practice that means a semester built around the academic calendar. Orientation week brings bystander and alcohol sessions for first-year students. Midterms bring sleep and stress campaigns in residence halls. A health educator trains peer educators, writes the scripts they deliver, books rooms, orders supplies and builds a short evaluation form for every workshop. Partners include residence life, athletics, Greek life, the counseling center and campus police.

The extension and school version

In Cooperative Extension, a community health educator teaches series-based lessons to adults and youth in county offices, schools, libraries, food pantries and housing sites. A lesson might cover reading a nutrition label, planning a week of meals from a pantry box, or safe home canning. The educator recruits participants through partner agencies, keeps attendance and pre and post surveys, and reports results up to the state program.

School-linked work sits between those two models. An educator employed by a university or a district wellness program may run family nights, staff a school wellness committee, or coach classroom teachers who deliver a prevention curriculum.

What ties the settings together

Whatever the address, the method repeats: assess what the group needs, pick an evidence-informed approach, adapt the materials to the audience's language and reading level, deliver, measure and report. The written record matters as much as the session itself, because funders, deans and county boards read the evaluation summary, not the slide deck.

As a rough guide, the entry point is a bachelor's degree in health education, health promotion, public health or a closely related field such as community nutrition or human development. ACHA's hiring guidelines spell out what campus offices look for. For entry-level health promotion roles, the table lists a bachelor's degree as required, a master's degree as preferred, and 1-2 years of related work or internship/practicum experience. For mid-level roles it lists 3-5 years of related work or internship/practicum experience. ACHA notes that a master's degree typically prepares people for many health promotion positions, while some roles may benefit from a doctoral degree.

Credentials worth planning for

• Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES), awarded by the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing (NCHEC). Eligibility rests on academic coursework, and the exam is the gate.
• Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES), also from NCHEC, for practitioners with field experience who are ready for an advanced exam.
• Certified in Public Health (CPH), awarded by the National Board of Public Health Examiners (NBPHE), a fit for graduates of public health programs.

ACHA's sample entry-level job description lists CHES, CPH, or eligibility for either, under preferred experience rather than minimum experience. To stay certified, NCHEC requires each CHES to earn 75 continuing education contact hours every five years, and NBPHE requires each CPH to report at least 30 recertification credits every two years.

Experience that counts

For a first job, useful material is work you can describe in numbers you collected yourself: workshops you delivered, peer educators you trained, surveys you designed and summarized. Useful routes in include:

• A practicum or internship in a campus health promotion office, a county extension office or a local health department
• Peer educator or resident assistant roles that involved planned health programming
• Volunteer or paid work with a food bank, after-school program or youth organization that ran structured lessons

Skills hiring managers test

Facilitation: can you hold a room of first-year students, or a handful of adults at a food pantry, and adapt on the fly? Writing, from plain-language handouts to grant reports. Basic evaluation skill: writing a pre and post survey, cleaning the data in a spreadsheet and turning it into a one-page summary. ACHA's sample job description asks for theory-based and evidence-informed programs, so expect interview questions about the theory behind a plan, such as the Health Belief Model or the Transtheoretical Model. Bilingual candidates can reach audiences that English-only materials miss, and a valid driver's license matters for extension roles that cover several counties.

BLS projects employment of health education specialists to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, which it classes as faster than the average for all occupations, with about 6,900 openings a year on average over the decade. Those projections cover the whole occupation, not only educators in schools and colleges. By BLS's breakdown of where the occupation works, educational services (state, local and private) account for 14 percent of jobs.

Where the education-sector jobs are

The May 2025 OEWS industry data put 7,740 health education specialists in educational services, and 6,950 of them in colleges, universities and professional schools. The college row's median was $62,380. Elementary and secondary schools employed 320, with a median of $61,080. BLS does not publish a separate row for Cooperative Extension work.

The SNAP-Ed shock

Extension-based educators lost a federal funding stream under a 2025 law: SNAP-Ed, the nutrition education program for people eligible for SNAP. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, amended the Food and Nutrition Act by ending required funding of SNAP-Ed with the fiscal year 2025 grant allocation, according to a USDA Food and Nutrition Service memo dated Sept. 4, 2025. The memo said unexpended fiscal year 2025 SNAP-Ed funds could be used in fiscal year 2026 to operate the program.

Two state examples show the effect. In an Aug. 6, 2025 release, University of Illinois Extension said the university's College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences would end an Illinois Extension-led SNAP-Ed program, cutting over 200 jobs, more than one-quarter of Illinois Extension's workforce. In California, a June 2026 research brief from the University of California's Nutrition Policy Institute reported that the state health department's CalFresh Healthy Living program, which had historically funded all 61 local health departments to deliver programming, continued on carry-over funds through April 30, 2026. The brief gave federal fiscal year 2026 as Oct. 1, 2025 to Sept. 30, 2026.

Reading a job posting in this climate

• Ask what pays for the position. A line in a university's general budget behaves differently from a grant that ends on a set date.
• Look at the program's other funders. Ask whether the program draws on more than one federal or state source.
• Check the reporting load. Ask how much of the week goes to evaluation and grant reporting.

Moving up

On campus, the path runs from health educator to senior specialist, assistant or associate director, and director of health promotion or well-being. ACHA's guidelines separate the levels by scope: entry-level staff focus on workshops and trainings, while mid-level staff add strategy and advocacy work and may supervise graduate students or newer professionals. In extension, educators may move into state program coordination or, with a graduate degree, into specialist roles. Evaluation and grant reporting experience also carries over to government agencies, ambulatory care providers and hospitals, which BLS lists among the occupation's employers.

Dear Search Committee,

I am applying for the Health Educator position in the Office of Health Promotion at Lakeview State University. For the past two years I have worked as a graduate assistant in my university's wellness center, where I planned and delivered sleep, stress and alcohol education for first-year students and supervised a team of twelve peer educators.

The project I am proudest of started with a problem in our own survey data: students reported poor sleep but skipped every sleep workshop we offered. I ran two focus groups in residence halls and learned that students wanted short, practical tips delivered where they already were. With our peer educators, I rebuilt the program as ten-minute floor meetings led by resident assistants, wrote the facilitator guide and trained every RA in the hall system before the spring term. Attendance rose and the follow-up survey gave us comments specific enough to revise the guide twice.

I also bring the unglamorous skills a small office depends on. I built our workshop evaluation forms, cleaned the results each month and wrote the one-page summaries that went to the dean of students. I have co-written a campus foundation grant and handled its final report.

Your office's emphasis on peer education and coalition work matches how I like to operate. I would welcome the chance to help your team plan next fall's orientation programming and to strengthen the peer educator training sequence.

I passed the CHES exam this spring and hold a Master of Public Health with a concentration in health behavior. Thank you for considering my application. I would be glad to share sample materials and evaluation reports.

Sincerely, Jordan Alvarez