If I remember correctly (and it has been awhile), this morning on the Today Show (yes, the Today Show), First Lady Michelle Obama encouraged people looking for jobs to find industries that are growing and get training in those fields. This could be at a local community college or a university across the globe.
For folks who are looking for jobs and careers, have I got an industry for you! There are workforce shortages in environmental health. This means that not-for-profits, manufacturing companies, local health departments, universities and many other employers have unmet demand for people with this type of training.
What do people trained in environmental health or environmental sciences and engineering do? Here is one view from the description of an academic department with some of the best training programs in this area: http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/prospective/overview.htm (pictures and quote directly from this site).
“As a division of the School of Public Health, we share in the School’s mandate to promote and protect the health of human populations. We approach that mandate by focusing on the human health impacts of physical, biological, and chemical agents in the community and workplace. In particular, our interest is the quantitative evaluation of these environmental risks and the means of their control. Environmental health is a truly interdisciplinary field. It draws on virtually all the natural sciences, as well as content from professional areas like engineering, to address the assessment of exposures, mechanisms of biological response, and their interconnections to estimate the health risk arising from environmental contaminants. The field is closely allied to environmental and occupational epidemiology and interfaces with policy analysis. We are committed to creating a culture in which students receive rigorous training for professional careers and/or develop the skills for perspective careers in research. I invite you to explore our website, including the links that more fully describe the variety and activities based in the division.”
– Katharine Hammond, Chair of the Environmental Health Sciences Division [University of California, Berkeley]
Start your search for the best environmental health, environmental studies, etc. program for you:
- US News Rankings for Environmental/Environmental health for http://tinyurl.com/4sxsq8a
- AEHAP on Careers in EH: http://www.careersenvhealth.com/
- ASPH program database: http://www.asph.org/document.cfm?page=1106
- or, just use your favorite search engine 🙂
