Nursing Resume: Examples, Templates
& Tips

The purpose of your resume is to get called for an interview, so your header should have up-to-date and easy-to-read contact information. The essential components are your name, phone numbers, professional email address, location and LinkedIn profile.

As a nurse, you may want to use a resume header that is professional — not too colorful or showy. While you can add a dose of your personality, try to keep the reader focused on your accomplishments.

Making a good first impression is important.

That’s why you should spend all the time you need writing a strong resume profile.

There are two types of profiles, each one good for different types of candidates:

Job seekers with at least five years of relevant experience should write a professional summary. Summaries offer a four- to five-sentence overview of a candidate’s strengths.

Job seekers who are entry-level or transitioning into a new field should consider writing a resume objective. Objective statements are more goal-oriented, explicitly saying what you can offer the employer and what you hope to gain from the job.

Ultimately, both profiles serve the same purpose — to make the hiring manager think you are the BEST qualified candidate for the position.

The trick is customizing your profile for every job. Generic resumes get overlooked, even blocked by a company’s resume screening system. You can counteract this by reading the job description closely and adding the right keywords.

Writing Tip

Don’t forget to highlight your specialties in your professional summary. Nursing has many subspecialties, and your skills will be defined by exactly what type of nurse you are. Make sure to list your focus areas up front.

From keeping track of every patient’s status and needs to soothing a worried family member, you use your skills daily. Your resume’s skills section needs to showcase your specific strengths to improve the health of your job search.

You use hard skills to handle the technical challenges that arise, from handling IVs to administering CPR. You use soft skills to build relationships with your colleagues and show patients the proper empathy and care.

It’s not a matter of hard vs soft skills. They actually work hand-in-hand to create the ideal nursing candidate.

Most importantly — make sure your resume includes a mix of skills. Most companies favor candidates with a well-rounded skill set.

Writing Tip

Nursing is such a detail-oriented profession that your skills should be as specific as possible. When you’re adding computer skills to your resume, for example, name the specific program. In other words, instead of writing “telemedicine,” you should write “SimplePractice.”

As a nurse, your work experience is anything but boring and neither should the work history section of your resume.

Whether you’re monitoring patients, administering medications or creating a personalized care plan, you’re always engaged in the job at hand. But, how best to represent that experience on your resume?

There are a few things to keep in mind when you write your experience section:

Sample nursing work experience entry:

For nurses like you, the education section can get confusing.

Degrees, licensures, certifications, awards, honors… the credentials begin to pile up quickly for nursing professionals. And so do the questions.

Do certifications go in the education section? Where should I list my licensures? Should all of this go before or after my bachelor’s degree?

These questions are asked so often that the American Nursing Association released guidelines for displaying credentials.

Here’s the preferred order of credentials for nurses:

You’ve had plenty of experiences outside of the hospital or care center that have made you the nurse you are today. Now you need to share those experiences on your resume.

You can do that by adding special sections. While the following sections are optional, we’ve seen them appear on some of the most successful nursing candidates’ resumes:

Writing tip

While certifications are considered “nice to have” for most careers, they are absolutely essential for nursing. Certifications can be listed in your education section, immediately following your degrees and licensure.