Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a community health worker and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A community health worker is responsible for educating community members on the various health issues both current and future and the available relevant health programs. He/she will promote a better understanding of the health issues affecting the community as a whole by responding to various general and specific needs and issues.
In addition to that, he/she will also get to perform the following roles; keeping accurate data and information on the health programs, collaborating with other professionals to promote health related issues, coordinating health programs, planning and budgeting for community health activities, conducting health related trainings and assessing and evaluating of the health conditions within the community.
Core Skills Required to be a Community Health Worker
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A community health worker should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Teamwork Skills:
Teamwork is the process of collaboratively working with a group of people with an aim to achieve a set goal within a business ensuring that the staff and management cooperate using their skills and provide constructive feedback.
A Community Health Worker needs to exercise effectiveness and understanding in creating teamwork using the right techniques in an environment of trust and cooperation with the aim of increasing productivity, higher morale, and a fulfilled workforce.
Multi-Tasking:
Multi-Tasking allows one to juggle and perform more than one task at a time without losing track of what you are working on or dropping the ball.
A Community Health Worker must learn the trick of multitasking and help the staff balance the competing demands of their time and energy that they are expected to handle multiple priorities every day without compromising on the effectiveness of the work done.
Safety at work:
Safety is being protected from hurt or other non-desirable outcomes that may tend to overrule a situation and cause damages of different kinds.
A Community Health Worker must learn to keep the organization safe from different risks by developing a high sense of alertness that detects danger from afar and stops it before it causes risk, danger or injury in the organization.
Empathy:
Empathy is the understanding of another person's condition from their perspective by placing yourself in their shoes and feeling what they are feeling.
A Community Health Worker ought to practice empathy with his staff by learning to be a good listener and understanding what his employees are going through and choosing to feel it with them through the use of imagination and accommodate them.
Attention to Detail:
Attention to Detail is the capacity to achieve a thoroughness and accuracy when accomplishing a task.
A Community Health Worker needs to have this prime characteristic and utilize it in a high performing organization that allows both the customers and staff to understand the need to be keen to all the details required to avoid massive costs for overlooked details that are common in the workplace.
Commitment to the Job:
Commitment to the Job is the feeling of responsibility that a person has towards a mission and goals of an organization.
A Community Health Worker should be diligent in helping the employees connect and commit to their job by creating proper communication channels that make the employees feel listened to and encouraged to provide feedback thus creating mutual trust and respect in the workplace.
Personal Accountability:
Personal Accountability is the feeling that you are entirely responsible for your actions and consequences taking ownership without blaming others.
A Community Health Worker should provide a list of duties and responsibilities that every employee is expected to perform and define timelines and supervisors who oversee the work to ensure each knows what she /he should do and remain accountable without passing blame.
Personal Drive:
Personal Drive is a combination of desire and energy in its simplest form directed at achieving a goal in whatever you have set your heart to accomplish.
A Community Health Worker needs to creatively design ways that drive the staff to carry out their work without wasting time by helping them understand and develop their self-motivation skills that assist them to take control of many different viewpoints of their life.
Persuading Others:
Persuading others is making sure your best ideas get a fair hearing without manipulating others or using trickery.
A Community Health Worker needs to creatively learn how to introduce new ideas that will boost growth for the company without managing the staff or put them under pressure with more work but with manageable goals that the employees will delight working on and grow as they do.
Using Common Sense:
Using Common Sense is the ability to see what is missing in a situation or a project and supplying it without necessarily being assigned or asked to do it.
A Community Health Worker needs to creatively train his employees always to see the missing element that is typically crucial in any workplace or project and take the opportunity to do business out of it.
Hard Skills Required to be a Community Health Worker
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A community health worker should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.