Community Nutrition Educators

Begin building your teaching skills by working as a camp counselor, tutor, or other type of volunteer or part-time educator. Another way to develop and practice your teaching skills is to research a nutrition-related topic and present information about the topic to your family and consumer science class, health club, or your family. Ask your audience to rate both the quality of the presentation and the information that you provided, and use this constructive criticism to improve your teaching abilities.

Read the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior’s blog, https://www.sneb.org/blog, to learn more about issues in nutrition.

Learn as much as you can about nutrition by watching food shows and documentaries, reading books about nutrition, visiting the Web sites of professional nutrition associations, and checking out Nutrition.gov, a U.S. Department of Agriculture–sponsored Web site that offers advice on healthy eating choices.

Participate in information interviews with community nutrition educators. In such an interview—which can be conducted in-person, on the phone, or through video-conferencing technology—you will get the opportunity to ask educators about their job duties, work environment, likes and dislikes about their careers, educational training, and other topics that will help you to learn more about the field. Ask your school counselor or a health teacher to help you set up information interviews. Perhaps you could even shadow them to learn what a typical day on the job is like.