What skills do you need for public health jobs?

Public health requires a mix of both soft and hard skills. This is of course, dependent on your job, but as a rule, you need both to be both scientifically inclined and have good people skills. If you're an analyst, for instance, you will spend most of your time with numbers but will have to convince others of your ideas.

If you work in a more public-facing job, like a health advisor, then it's focused a great deal more on soft skills. However, you do need medical knowledge and a grasp of numbers in order to understand how behaviors affect risk.