Health Education Specialist Job Description

A Health Education Specialist decides what a health program should try to change, how it will try, and how anyone will know whether it worked. Delivery staff run the workshops and the outreach tables; the specialist builds the plan they follow and the evidence that tells leadership whether to keep paying for it. In the education sector, that work sits in college and university health promotion offices, in academic centers that evaluate programs for state agencies and foundations, and in school districts running grant-funded prevention efforts.

The federal description of the occupation lines up closely with this planning role. The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook lists assessing the health needs of individuals and communities, evaluating how well programs and educational materials work, collecting and analyzing data to understand a community and improve its programs and services, training community health workers or other healthcare providers, and supervising the staff who carry out health education programs. In public health departments, the Handbook adds, these specialists may oversee grants and the programs those grants fund.

Assessment and planning

The work starts before a program exists. A specialist pulls together survey results, service records and interviews to define the problem, then writes measurable objectives and a logic model that links each activity to short- and long-term outcomes. On a campus, the American College Health Association (ACHA) offers MAP-IT, a five-part sequence of Mobilize, Assess, Plan, Implement and Track, adapted from Healthy People 2020, which ACHA says can be used to plan and evaluate public health interventions toward a school's Healthy Campus goals. In practice, that means recruiting a working group of students, faculty and staff, choosing the few issues the data support, and writing a plan the institution can fund.

Evaluation

Evaluation is the center of this version of the job. CDC's Program Evaluation Framework, 2024, published in MMWR in September 2024, updates the agency's 1999 framework and is meant to apply at any level, from a single program to broader systems. It sets out six steps: Assess context; Describe the program; Focus the evaluation questions and design; Gather credible evidence; Generate and support conclusions; and Act on findings. It names five federal evaluation standards (relevance and utility, rigor, independence and objectivity, transparency, and ethics) and adds three cross-cutting actions for every step: engage collaboratively, advance equity, and learn from and use insights. The specialist turns that structure into a written evaluation plan, picks indicators, builds the instruments, and reports what the data show, including results nobody wanted.

Technical assistance

The third piece is helping other people do the work well. Specialists coach partner schools, clinics and community groups on implementation fidelity, data collection and reporting; review their workplans; and train the educators who deliver a curriculum so that what happens in the room matches what the evaluation measures. A single week can include a coalition meeting, a data-cleaning session, a call with a funder's project officer, and an afternoon rewriting survey items that respondents kept misreading.

The job suits people who are as comfortable in a spreadsheet as in a meeting room, and who can write a findings memo that a dean, a superintendent or a grant officer will read to the end.

Education

According to BLS, health education specialists typically need at least a bachelor's degree; the fields it names are health promotion and health education, although employers may accept other majors, including business, social science, and healthcare fields. Some positions call for a master's or doctoral degree, and BLS lists graduate fields such as community health education, school health education, public health education, and health promotion. For a planning and evaluation post, look for a program whose coursework covers research design, biostatistics, qualitative analysis and program evaluation, and use an internship to put a first evaluation report on your resume.

The professional framework

The field's credentialing body, the National Commission for Health Education Credentialing (NCHEC), runs a periodic practice analysis in collaboration with the Society for Public Health Education (SOPHE). Its newest model, HESPA III 2025, identifies nine Areas of Responsibility across entry and advanced levels:

• Area I: Assessment
• Area II: Planning
• Area III: Implementation
• Area IV: Evaluation
• Area V: Research
• Area VI: Advocacy
• Area VII: Communication
• Area VIII: Administration and Management
• Area IX: Ethics, Leadership, and Professionalism

For a specialist who plans and evaluates, Areas I, II, IV and V are the core of the job. NCHEC says the HESPA III framework will form the basis for the CHES and MCHES exams beginning in 2027.

Certification

BLS notes that some employers require or prefer certification for these workers. The credentials to know:

• Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES), from NCHEC. NCHEC set the April 2027 CHES exam window for April 22 to May 1, 2027, with registration from Nov. 1, 2026 to Feb. 28, 2027.
• Master Certified Health Education Specialist (MCHES), from NCHEC. The credential for experienced practitioners working at the advanced level.
• Certified in Public Health (CPH), from the National Board of Public Health Examiners. A broader public health credential that suits evaluation staff who work across program areas.

Methods and tools

As a rough guide, expect two to four years of program delivery, research assistant or data work before leading a planning or evaluation project on your own. The working toolkit includes logic models and theories of change; survey design and cognitive testing; sampling; descriptive and inferential statistics in R, SAS, SPSS or Stata; qualitative coding in NVivo, Dedoose or ATLAS.ti; data capture in REDCap or Qualtrics; and charts and dashboards in Excel, Tableau or Power BI. For newcomers, CDC's 2024 Program Evaluation Framework Action Guide was written to help new or early career evaluators apply the framework, as a how-to guide for planning, designing, and implementing evaluations. Bring a logic model, a survey you built and a short findings memo to the interview: they show the work faster than a list of courses.

BLS's 2025-35 projection has health education specialist employment growing 6 percent, faster than the all-occupation average, and puts openings at about 6,900 each year, on average, over the decade. Those figures describe the whole occupation; BLS does not report planning and evaluation specialists separately. In the Handbook's breakdown of the largest employers, government, excluding state and local education and hospitals, is the biggest group, with 24 percent of the occupation's jobs.

Pay outside the education band

The band on this page uses OEWS data for educational services, and other sectors pay differently. Among the May 2025 industry medians BLS lists for the occupation, government, excluding state and local education and hospitals, paid $69,740, while social assistance paid $50,230. Evaluation and planning skills built in a university center can carry into either setting, so the choice comes down to pay, how secure the funding is, and what questions each employer wants answered.

Evaluation has a federal anchor

CDC's 2024 framework report notes that at the federal level, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018, known as the Evidence Act, prioritizes and "elevates program evaluation as a critical agency function." For a specialist working on federally funded programs, fluency in that vocabulary, from evaluation plans to performance measures, is worth building even when a posting does not ask for it.

The campus market

College health promotion has its own planning tradition. ACHA's Healthy Campus initiative has supported institutions since 1985, historically by linking campus goals to national health objectives. The current Healthy Campus Framework, published in May 2020 and republished with updates in May 2023, moved away from that model: in ACHA's words, gone are national health objectives and decade-long goals. Instead, a campus uses ACHA's institutional inventory to determine where it is, where it wants to be and how to get there. That design leaves goal-setting to each campus, and the inventory, objectives and tracking that follow are planning work.

How to read a posting

• Ask for a recent evaluation report. A report the office has already produced shows the methods, data systems and audiences you would inherit.
• Check the evaluation share. A posting titled specialist can be mostly delivery work; the duties list, not the title, tells you which job it is.
• Look for a methods lead. A role that reports to an evaluator or a principal investigator is a good place to learn study design before running your own.
• Plan the credential timing. If a posting asks for CHES within a set period after hire, match the start date to an exam window.

The steady part of the case: a program that wants continued funding needs evidence of what it did and what changed, and somebody has to design that evidence. In schools and on campuses, that person can be the Health Education Specialist.

Dear Search Committee,

Please consider my application for the Health Education Specialist role in the Office of Health Promotion at [University]. For three years now I have been a program evaluation associate at [Regional Prevention Center], planning and evaluating substance use prevention and sexual health programs for four partner colleges and two school districts.

My strongest work is on the front end of programs. Last year I led a needs assessment for a partner campus that combined a student survey, six focus groups and a review of counseling center referral data. The findings narrowed a long list of concerns to two priorities, and I wrote the program plan, logic model and evaluation plan the campus used to secure a state prevention grant. I also built the survey instruments in REDCap, ran cognitive interviews with students to fix confusing items, and wrote the analysis code in R so the next cohort could rerun it without me.

I enjoy technical assistance as much as analysis. Each semester I train the peer educators and resident advisers who deliver our curriculum, and I visit sessions to check that the program in the room matches the program in the plan. When fidelity slipped at one site, I worked with the coordinator on a shorter session format instead of simply flagging the problem in a report.

I hold a Master of Public Health in community health education and passed the CHES exam two years ago. Your office's work on a Healthy Campus inventory is the kind of planning I want to do full time, and I would welcome the chance to discuss how I could support it.

Sincerely, [Your Name]