Overview
Public health is a broad field, and that breadth is both an advantage and a challenge for graduates. Your degree may have covered epidemiology, health promotion, policy analysis, and statistics, but a hiring manager at a local authority or NHS public health team wants to know which of those skills you can actually apply. The strongest graduate public health resumes show practical projects with real data and real populations, not just coursework topics.
This resume belongs to Daniel Okoro, a BSc Public Health graduate from the University of Liverpool who is applying for junior public health officer and public health analyst roles. He completed a placement year with Liverpool City Council's public health team and has experience analysing health data, writing briefings, and supporting community health campaigns. His resume works because every line connects to a practical public health activity with measurable outcomes.
What Makes This Resume Work
The placement year is described as genuine professional work. Daniel spent 12 months working in Liverpool City Council's public health directorate, and his resume reads like a job description rather than a placement summary. He produced monthly health intelligence reports using PHE Fingertips data, contributed to the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA), and helped coordinate a ward level diabetes prevention programme. This tells an employer he has already done the work they would ask a junior officer to do.
Data analysis skills are demonstrated through specific outputs. He describes analysing deprivation and health outcomes data for 30 council wards, creating data visualisations in Excel and R for committee presentations, and calculating age standardised mortality rates for the annual public health report. These are the routine analytical tasks of a public health team, and showing he can do them reduces the training burden for a new employer.
Health promotion experience involves real community engagement. He helped deliver a smoking cessation campaign targeting 5 community centres in deprived wards, coordinated stall events that reached 300 residents, and collected pre and post campaign awareness survey data from 180 participants. Community engagement is a core part of public health work, and demonstrating that he can operate outside an office environment is valuable.
Policy awareness runs through the resume. He references the Public Health Outcomes Framework, the NHS Long Term Plan, and local health inequalities strategies. He also mentions attending 6 Health and Wellbeing Board meetings and drafting a briefing paper for the Director of Public Health. This policy literacy shows he understands the governance context of public health work.
Key Takeaways
Treat your placement or project work as professional experience. Describe the outputs you produced, the data you analysed, and the meetings you attended. If you wrote reports, state who read them. If you analysed data, state how many records or wards were involved.
Show your analytical toolkit clearly. Name the software (Excel, R, SPSS, Stata), the datasets (PHE Fingertips, ONS, local authority data), and the statistical methods you used. Public health teams need analysts who can work independently with data.
Include community facing work alongside desk based analysis. Health promotion campaigns, stakeholder engagement, and survey collection show you can work with communities as well as spreadsheets. Both skill sets matter for a junior public health role.
