The Field Loses an Opportunity to Learn From Itself
Ishan Shah, Co-Founder and CEO at Peerakeet, and Natasha Faruqui, Healthcare Strategy at Peerakeet
A certified peer specialist spends her day helping other people navigate recovery.
She helps someone find housing after treatment. She responds to messages from participants who are struggling. She sits with uncertainty, relapse, grief, loneliness, and the complicated realities of rebuilding a life.
Then she goes home.
And often, she is doing that work without a professional community of her own.
This is one of the least discussed challenges in the peer support workforce, which is striking given how fast that workforce has grown. The field now employs over 424,000 professionals across the United States, and peer services are present in roughly a quarter of all mental health programs and more than half of all substance use treatment facilities (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024). As of 2023, 49 states offered some form of peer specialist certification (Ostrow et al., 2025). By almost any measure, the workforce has arrived.
The professional infrastructure around it has not kept pace.
Peer support is built on human connection, yet many peer specialists work in relative professional isolation. A peer may be the only person in their role at a small recovery organization. Another may work remotely across multiple counties. Some work within clinical teams where they are the sole employee bringing lived experience to the table. Others are building peer programs from the ground up with little opportunity to learn from colleagues facing similar challenges.
The result is a workforce that is growing rapidly but often lacks the professional scaffolding that many other professions take for granted.
The Missing Infrastructure
Most professions have systems that allow practitioners to learn from one another continuously throughout their careers.
Physicians have professional societies, conferences, journals, and specialty organizations. Researchers collaborate through academic networks and publications. Software developers contribute to open-source communities and technical forums. Founders have accelerators, operator groups, and investor networks.
These structures do more than facilitate communication. They allow knowledge to spread. A lesson learned in one organization becomes a lesson available to hundreds. A successful approach developed in one setting becomes a practice that others can adapt and improve.
Peer support has historically relied on something different: local relationships. That model worked when the field was smaller. But the peer workforce has expanded dramatically, and with it, the stakes of disconnection. Research consistently links isolation to poor workforce outcomes. A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Mental Health Systems identified the most common barriers to peer effectiveness as lack of role clarity, discrimination from non-peer colleagues, and inadequate access to additional training, all of which are worsened by professional isolation (Fortuna et al., 2022). A scoping review in Frontiers in Public Health examining twenty studies on peer workforce outcomes found that organizational factors, supervisory support and professional development opportunities specifically were among the strongest predictors of retention, while inadequate support was one of the most consistent drivers of attrition (Bell et al., 2025).
Yet much of the knowledge that makes peer support effective remains trapped within individual organizations.
A peer in Pennsylvania may develop an effective strategy for helping participants stay engaged after treatment. A peer in Minnesota may discover a successful approach to rebuilding trust after relapse. A peer in Mississippi may create a resource-sharing workflow that saves hours each week. In most cases, those lessons never travel very far. The field loses an opportunity to learn from itself.
The Knowledge Training Cannot Teach
Certification programs play an important role in preparing peer specialists for practice. Most state programs require roughly 80 hours of training and a written examination, a baseline that has helped standardize entry into the workforce (Ostrow et al., 2025). But some of the most valuable knowledge in peer support develops only through experience.
Questions like:
- How do you respond when someone disappears for three weeks and suddenly returns?
- How do you navigate professional boundaries while remaining authentically supportive?
- How do you manage burnout after carrying difficult stories day after day?
- How do you rebuild engagement after a participant relapses?
- How do you help someone remain connected to care when motivation disappears?
These are not questions with simple answers. They are situations that peers encounter repeatedly throughout their careers, and they are often best understood through conversations with others who have faced similar challenges. A 2024 qualitative study of peer workers asked directly about the strategies they use to stay effective and well in their roles. What they described was not formal training, it was peer consultation, informal mentorship, and the ability to debrief with someone who understood the specific weight of the work (Saad et al., 2024). Without structured access to that kind of exchange, peers are left developing those skills in isolation, at the cost of time and, sometimes, of the people they are trying to support.
Professional networks create opportunities for that learning to occur, not through formal curricula alone, but through ongoing dialogue, mentorship, and shared experience.
Why Workforce Connection Matters
The conversation around peer support often focuses on participant outcomes. That focus is understandable. The ultimate goal is helping people achieve and sustain recovery.
But workforce outcomes matter too, and they are connected. A 2021 study found that supervisory mentorship and a recovery-oriented workplace together accounted for over 61% of the variance in peer specialists' job satisfaction (Abraham et al., 2022). Role clarity, simply knowing what you are there to do, reduced burnout. Those conditions are not self-generating. They require organizational investment, and for many peers, they require access to a professional community that extends beyond a single employer.
A disconnected workforce struggles to share best practices. A workforce without mentorship loses institutional knowledge every time someone leaves a role. A workforce operating in isolation faces greater risk of burnout and turnover, and in 2022, 39 states reported active shortages of peer specialists even as the total number of certified peers continued to grow (Ostrow et al., 2025). That gap between supply and effective deployment is, in part, a retention and support problem. Workforce connection is one of the structural conditions that addresses it.
A workforce without a strong professional identity also has a harder time advocating for itself, attracting new talent, and demonstrating its value within larger healthcare systems. These challenges are not unique to peer support. Nearly every profession that has successfully scaled has invested in systems that connect practitioners to one another. Professional networks are one of those systems. They create spaces where people can ask questions, share resources, discuss challenges, and strengthen the collective capacity of the field. Over time, those connections become something larger than networking. They become infrastructure.
What the Future Could Look Like
As peer support continues expanding across healthcare, recovery, mental health, education, and community settings, the need for stronger professional infrastructure will only increase. Training programs will remain important. Supervision will remain important. Organizations will remain important.
But the future of the field may depend equally on something else: the ability of peer specialists to remain connected to one another regardless of employer, geography, or setting.
Because peer support has always been built on relationships. Not just between peers and participants. But between peers themselves. The stronger those connections become, the stronger the workforce becomes. And ultimately, the stronger the workforce becomes, the more people it can help.
Why It Matters at Peerakeet
The peer support workforce has grown rapidly, but the professional infrastructure surrounding it has not always grown at the same pace. Many peer specialists still operate without easy access to mentorship, collaboration, resource sharing, or broader professional communities outside their own organizations.
This is the challenge Peerakeet Community was designed to address. Peerakeet Community provides a dedicated space for peer professionals to connect, share knowledge, discuss challenges, exchange resources, and learn from one another across organizations and geographic boundaries. For individual peers, this creates greater access to mentorship, collaboration, and professional support. For organizations, it strengthens workforce development by helping staff learn from a broader network of practitioners. For the field as a whole, it creates opportunities to share knowledge, surface best practices, and strengthen professional identity across a growing workforce.
The future of peer support will not be defined solely by how many peer specialists enter the workforce. It will also be defined by how effectively that workforce stays connected.
Because peer support has always been built on the idea that recovery happens in a community. The same may be true for the workforce itself.
References
Abraham, K. M., Erickson, P. S., Sata, M. J., & Lewis, S. B. (2022). Job satisfaction and burnout among peer support specialists: The contributions of supervisory mentorship, recovery-oriented workplaces, and role clarity. Advances in Mental Health, 20(1), 38–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/18387357.2021.1977667
Saad, G., Honey, A., Schaecken, P., & Scanlan, J. N. (2024). Strategies and supports used by mental health peer workers to facilitate role performance and satisfaction. Advances in Mental Health, 22(2), 179–195. https://doi.org/10.1080/18387357.2023.2237135
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2024). Occupational employment and wage statistics: Substance abuse, behavioral disorder, and mental health counselors. https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes211018.htm
Fortuna, K. L., Myers, A. L., Walsh, D., Brooks, J., & Deegan, P. (2022). The impact of peer support work on the mental health of peer support specialists. International Journal of Mental Health Systems, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13033-022-00561-8
Bell JS, Watson DP, Griffin T, Castedo de Martell S, Kay ES, Hawk M, Ray B and Hudson M (2025) Workforce outcomes among substance use peer supports: a scoping review of individual and organizational influences. Front. Public Health 12:1515264. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1515264
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2024). Peer support specialists: A growing mental health and addictions workforce. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-HE20_400-PURL-gpo234443/pdf/GOVPUB-HE20_400-PURL-gpo234443.pdf
Ostrow, L., Cook, J. A., Pelot, M., Robinett, K., Salzer, M. S., & Burke-Miller, J. K. (2025). Employment status following peer specialist certification: Results of a 3-year multistate survey. Psychiatric Services, 76(5), 497-501. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.20240166