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The Caring Support Blog

Sample Resume for Registered Nurses

April 26, 2023

To be successful in the role of a nurse, one must possess a particularly particular personality type. It should therefore not come as much of a surprise that there have historically been staffing shortages in nursing.

When it comes to preparing your nursing resume, you should feel free to use any of the common resume forms and material that can be found on the internet as a guide. Even nurses who have recently finished their training can have diverse clinical experiences, interests, and skill sets because the nursing profession encompasses a wide variety of subspecialties and career paths. Additional information needs to be included in your nursing resume in order to demonstrate why you are the ideal candidate for the position being advertised.

Read More: Best Recommendations To Write A Winning Resume For A Registered Nurse Job

Make sure you include your personal statement on your resume

Patients who come into contact with you on a regular basis may not be having the best day of their lives when you first make eye contact with them. The manner in which you present yourself to a new person, often known as the initial impression you give, has the potential to dictate the course of the rest of your encounters with that person. When it comes to the personal statement that you provide in your nursing resumes, the situation is very similar: your reader is in a hurry and may not be their best or most generous self when they pick up your application. Therefore, if you want to make a positive first impression, include a personal statement on your nursing resume that accomplishes just three things but does them well.

In your personal statement, you should establish yourself as a registered nurse, including your area of specialty as well as the breadth and depth of your professional experience. It ought to give an idea of what it is that you have to offer your new company by demonstrating what you brought to your previous employers, and this should be done by exhibiting what you delivered to your past employers. Additionally, it should demonstrate how your goals align with those of the business.

The summary of your resume should be sufficiently convincing to reassure the employer that you are the ideal applicant. Take this as an example:

Licensed Registered Nurse with over five years of clinical experience looking to secure a position at Lutheran Medical Center that will allow me to utilize my demonstrated expertise in providing routine patient care. Maintained a satisfaction rate of 95% among patients at Centura Health. 10 new nurses were successfully brought on board.

Include your work history

You probably recall how steep the learning curve is in nursing, whether you just graduated from nursing school or have years of experience in the field. Experience is incredibly valuable in the nursing profession; schooling and classroom training are merely meant to prepare you for all that you'll learn once you start working in a real-world environment that is sometimes busy and even chaotic at times. Therefore, you need to make sure that your nurse's resume includes all of that experience. Stick with a chronological format, which implies providing an account of your job history in an order that is reverse chronological. This is the information that recruiters anticipate seeing, and the information that is designed to filter in the most accurate manner.

If you are building a nursing resume but do not have any registered nurse experience, you should emphasize the work that you did before becoming a registered nurse, such as volunteer work, placements, and other jobs. You will have gained a significant amount of this experience regardless of how you became a registered nurse (RN), therefore everything counts very highly toward your overall score. Below is a good example of a work history for your resume:

Centura Health

Registered Nurse

2012–2020

  1. Responsible for the treatment, well-being, and long-term health planning of more than 15 patients.
  2. Assisted patients who had limited mobility in any and all movements that were required. Maintained a positive score from patients in the area of compassion at 97%.
  3. Developed patient evaluations, diagnosis, and treatment strategies for a large number of patients.
  4. 10 new nurses have been hired and are currently undergoing training in quality, customized care, and regulatory compliance rules.

Provide your educational background

The completion of a nursing program at a university is most likely the most prevalent way that people enter the nursing profession; however, it is by no means the only way. You can also check to see that the education portion of your nursing resume has only the information that is necessary and nothing else. Therefore, omit any references to grades or topics studied in university. Please list your academic credentials in the reverse sequence of their occurrence in your life. If you already have a post-secondary qualification and some work experience under your belt, it is fine to omit the information about your high school education from your application.

Highlight your skills 

There are a variety of settings in nursing that call for specialized skill sets. The abilities that allow you to get through a night in an accident and emergency with your patients are not going to be the same abilities that allow you to keep the inhabitants of a nursing home happy and healthy. Because of this, the abilities part of your nursing resume will need to be updated with each new application you submit. It will become quite tedious very soon if you have to sit down and write a fresh one every time you send in a resume. You can prevent this from happening if you create a master list of nursing skills and then just copy and paste entries from that list into the appropriate spots wherever they are needed. This will entail only a very tiny increase in work right now, but a significant decrease in work in the future.

Now, return to the advertisement for the nursing job, and copy and paste five to ten abilities from your master list into your nursing resume. Make sure that you at least cover what is required by the job description. A few examples can be stress management, patient care and assessment, medication administration and management, attention to detail, compassion, decision-making, strong clinical judgement, technical skills, administering and monitoring medications, safe patient transfer supervision, strong communication skills, patient evaluation and the like.

Include a cover letter

A cover letter is often expected to be included in the application. If there is absolutely no mention of a cover letter anywhere in the application, then it is safe to assume that you are expected to submit one.

The ideal length for a cover letter for a nursing position is between 250 and 400 words, and it should be able to fit on a single page of A4 paper without exceeding. Put a strong call to action at the end of your nursing cover letter. This will demonstrate that you are eager to move on to the next step of the recruitment process. Below is an example of a cover letter:

Your Name

Title

Current Company (If Any)

Mailing Address

Phone Number

Email Address


Dear [Hiring Manager Name],

Managing my unit's budget and cutting 35% from it without sacrificing the quality of patient care was one of my proudest moments as a nurse. I would be even prouder to replicate that success at Maine Medical Center's Portland Unit.

As a nurse with 5 years of experience, I'm drawn to MMC's patient-centred focus. MMC's belief in ownership and innovation creates a respectful environment where I believe my talents would shine. Among my past achievements:

  1. Created efficient schedules that cut 10% of the scheduling waste from the unit.
  2. Trained 11 nursing staff in EMR systems and best practices.
  3. Led an HCAHPS improvement drive that helped our hospital recoup an extra 1% of Medicaid reimbursements.

I'm excited to see how much more I can do in a focused system like MMC's.

Can we set up a meeting to discuss how my past work can translate to elevated success for MMC's patients?


Best Regards,

[Your Name]


We have provided you samples for each and every part of how to create a sample resume for a registered nurse job, you might be curious what it looks like as a whole. Here's a great example:

building a nursing resume
Sample Registered Nurse Resume

Having said that, I am aware that registered nurses already have an excessive amount of responsibilities. Worry not because even if it seems impossible to create the resume from scratch, we have you covered. Simply click on this link to access our free online resume builder

About The Author
Arielle Rosales
Content Writer

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