Assessing the Developmental Impact of Service-Learning Participation on Health Education Careers: A Study of SLISE Alumni

Service-learning is a pedagogical approach that bridges classroom learning and hands-on experience, thus enhancing skills development and boosting career preparedness. Student Leaders in Sex Education (SLISE) is a year-long sexual health education service-learning opportunity at California State University, Los Angeles that blends didactic classroom-based training with experiential fieldwork, and is designed to prepare undergraduate students for careers in health education. To understand how SLISE contributes to post-undergraduate health education career preparedness, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 of 16 participants who were primarily female, first-generation college students, and were working in health education, from the 2022–2023 SLISE cohort. Thematic analysis revealed two larger key themes related to SLISE participants’ health education career preparedness: (1) skills acquisition and (2) interpersonal growth. Under skills acquisition, both general and health education-specific skills were identified as subthemes. Participants reported acquiring the general skills of communication, time management, public speaking, teamwork, and software proficiency. The service-learning program also provided participants with the health education-specific skills of content tailoring and community engagement. Under the key theme of interpersonal growth, the following subthemes were identified: exposure leading to career certainty, cohort value, health knowledge improvement, and increased self-efficacy. This study provides evidence that immersive training through programs such as SLISE can better prepare public health students for careers in health education thus helping to further solidify the value of service-learning as an important method for health educator career preparation.