Community Health Worker Resume Examples & Writing Guide

This sample is a community health worker (CHW) with about seven years of work: a federally qualified health center, a county health department contract and a hospital care-transitions team. The name and employers are invented. Keep the shape and put in your own caseload, languages and program names.

Most CHW roles sit inside a grant, a Medicaid managed care contract or a health center budget line. The person hiring is usually a program manager or a nurse supervisor with reporting deadlines. Four things decide the interview.

• Do you know the community? Say the neighborhoods, the ZIP codes, the population and the languages. "Grew up in and still live in the service area" is a real qualification for this job, not a personal note.
• Languages, with your level. Write "Spanish: fluent, including medical vocabulary" or "Haitian Creole: conversational". A CHW posting for a bilingual role is often filled on this line alone.
• Can you document? Grant-funded programs live or die on reporting. Name the EHR (Epic, Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks), the referral platform (findhelp, Unite Us), and say you documented the same day.
• Volume and outcomes. Caseload, visits per week, screenings completed, referrals closed, enrollments, no-show reduction. Managers need to write these numbers into a report next quarter.

“The resumes that stand out say who they served and how many. If a person tells me they carried 60 clients in a specific neighborhood and closed nine out of ten referrals, that tells me more than any list of qualities. And put the language proficiency near the top, because half our postings turn on it.”

Use a summary if you have done outreach, case management or clinic work before. Use an objective if you are coming from a related field or straight out of a CHW training program. Get the language, the population and one number into the first two lines.

The duties of a community health worker vary by program, so write the ones you actually did with the count attached. Below are bullets by program type. Change the numbers to yours.

Split the list. Job postings for this role usually list core competencies from the CHW field, so mirroring the wording helps the screening software and the reader.

Client-facing skills:

• Home visiting and street outreach
• Motivational interviewing and goal setting
• Health coaching for diabetes, hypertension and asthma
• Advocacy with landlords, utilities, schools and clinics
• Trauma-informed, culturally responsive practice
• Group facilitation and health education classes

Systems and paperwork:

• EHR documentation (Epic, eClinicalWorks, Athenahealth)
• Referral platforms (findhelp, Unite Us)
• Social needs screening tools such as PRAPARE
• Benefit applications: Medicaid, SNAP, WIC, marketplace plans
• Grant reporting and encounter counts
• HIPAA and consent handling

Things worth naming that people forget:

• Language and level ("Spanish: fluent, medical vocabulary")
• Valid driver's license and use of own car for home visits
• Knowledge of specific neighborhoods and local agencies
• Lived experience of the condition or community served, if you are comfortable saying so
• Evening and weekend availability for outreach events

There is no single national CHW license in the US. Certification is run state by state, and the rules differ a lot: some states certify individuals through their health department, some approve training programs, some have nothing formal, and Medicaid reimbursement rules can require certification in states that have it. Check your own state health department before you write anything.

• If your state certifies CHWs and you hold it, list it with the state name and status: "State Community Health Worker certification (Texas), active".
• If your state certifies and you are working toward it, say so plainly: "State CHW certification in progress, coursework completed, exam scheduled".
• If your state has no certification, list the training instead with the hours: "Community Health Worker training, 160 hours, [program name], 2024".
• Add the short trainings that programs ask for: Mental Health First Aid, first aid and CPR, naloxone administration, HIPAA, motivational interviewing, and Certified Application Counselor training if you help with insurance enrollment.
• Education: a high school diploma or GED is the usual minimum. An associate degree in public health or human services helps for CHW II and supervisor roles. Do not hide a degree in an unrelated field; list it and let the CHW training carry the relevance.

This is one of the few health roles where being from the community counts as a qualification. Employers hire people with volunteer, church, promotora or peer background all the time. Build the resume around contact with people and around proof you can keep records.

1. 1Put your languages and your neighborhood knowledge in the summary, in the first sentence.
2. 2Count your volunteer work like a job: hours, people reached, events staffed, families helped.
3. 3List any short training you already have, even a four-hour Mental Health First Aid class or a CPR card.
4. 4Show you can document: any job with a log, a register, a till reconciliation or a shift report proves it.
5. 5Say you can drive and have insurance if the posting mentions home visits, because many do.
6. 6Apply to outreach worker, patient navigator, promotora, peer support and enrollment assister postings too. They are often the same work under another title.

• One page if you have under five years, two pages once you have several programs and a certification list. Public health hiring often runs through a county or hospital system, so the file has to survive a plain applicant tracking system.
• No photo, no date of birth, no marital status. If you trained abroad, a US-style resume drops all of that.
• Single column, standard headings, PDF unless the posting asks for Word. County and health system portals often reject anything else.
• Mirror the posting's words. Common ones: community health worker, CHW, promotora, patient navigator, outreach, care coordination, social determinants of health, closed-loop referral, health equity, home visiting, motivational interviewing, HIPAA, Medicaid enrollment.
• If the posting names a program (Healthy Start, WIC, a diabetes prevention program, a Medicaid managed care plan), use the exact name in a bullet if you have really worked with it.
• Add a short "Languages" line with levels. It is often the first filter a manager applies.

Outside the US the same work goes by other names: health extension worker in Ethiopia, ASHA worker in India, barangay health worker in the Philippines. If your experience is from one of those systems, keep the local job title, then add one clause explaining the scope in US terms, for example "village-level health outreach covering 800 households, comparable to a US community health worker role".