Registered Nurse Resume Templates and Examples for 2024

Registered Nurse Resume Template Example

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What Registered Nurse Resume Template Should You Use?

Choose a simple and effective template if you want your resume to make a good impression on recruiters and hiring managers. The best registered nurse resume template will be clean, organized, and well-written. Although you should aim to stand out among other nursing applicants, avoid flashy templates with too many graphics. Instead, opt for a template that highlights your key skills, clinical experience, and certifications. Simple formatting and adequate spacing will allow your text to shine.

What to Include in a Registered Nurse Resume

After you’ve picked the perfect template, it’s time to start writing. You’ll use all the basic elements of a resume and customize each part to reflect your unique professional and educational history. Avoid being overwhelmed by taking the writing process one section at a time. First, let’s do a quick breakdown of what exactly should be included on your registered nurse resume:

• Contact Information. Let resume readers know who you are and how to contact you for an interview. Provide your name, phone number, email address, location, and links to online professional profiles like LinkedIn.
• Profile. Summarize your professional nursing objective by presenting your career goal(s) and what you have to offer in 2-3 sentences. Be sure to include the title of the position you’re applying for and the company’s name, and try to add relevant keywords from the job posting.
• Work Experience. Make a reverse chronological list of your most recent and relevant work history. Include your employer, job title, location, and dates of employment. Then, go into detail about your job duties. As much as possible, show examples of how you performed your responsibilities using action verbs.
• Education. Provide at least your nursing degree in the education section and up to one more that may be relevant to the job. Include where and when you received your degrees and any academic awards or accolades you earned.
• Certification. As a registered nurse, your license is an integral part of your resume. Include the license name, where it’s valid, and when you received it. Also, list any medical certifications you’ve earned (e.g., PALS, ACLS, BLS).
• Key Skills. Choose your most relevant nursing skills that align with the job description to include on your resume. We recommend including both hard skills (e.g., phlebotomy, charting, infection control) and soft skills (e.g., problem-solving, communication, teamwork).

How To Write a Registered Nurse Resume

Creating a document that fully expresses all of the technical nursing skills you’ve learned and continue to develop can be a challenge. We’re here to help guide you through the process of creating a registered nurse resume that speaks to your abilities. Let’s look at some key components before we show you a real resume example.

Quantify your experience

Want to boost your professional credibility? Go deeper than a list of work experience and responsibilities. Provide real examples of how you affected change in your workplace, using numbers and metrics when possible. Show your prospective employer how you prioritize patient care and what you accomplished because of it. For example:

Tailor your resume for each application

Think of your resume as an advertisement. You’re trying to capture the attention of recruiters and hiring managers for an interview. To do that, you need to know what they want. Take what you know about their needs from the job description and determine how your experience, education, and skills are a perfect match. Blend some of the language used by the company into your resume in an organic way, but don’t force it. Get creative with how you present your experience as the solution to their problem.

Highlight both hard and soft skills

List your hard skills in their own “key skills” section. These attributes determine your eligibility for a job and should be showcased in a straightforward way that stands out.

On the other hand, soft skills should be referenced indirectly rather than highlighted in their own section — these attributes can seem rather vague and generic when grouped together, but when they are sprinkled throughout your resume they will subtly support the idea that you would be a valuable member of the hiring organization’s team.

It’s worth noting once more that the skills you include on your resume should be sourced from the target job description as much as possible. Look at the table below for examples of the types of key skills that should be included on your Registered Nurse resume.

Common hard and soft skills for a Registered Nurse

Use descriptive action verbs

Action verbs will make your resume concise and dynamic. They also help you avoid speaking in the first person (e.g., “I was responsible for administering…”). Hiring managers already know who they’re reading about, so save space on your resume by avoiding first-person grammar. Instead, begin sentences with an action verb to cut to the chase and highlight what you did. Consider using some of these words on your registered nurse resume:

What if you don’t have experience?

Even if you haven’t worked professionally as a nurse yet, there are plenty of transferable skills and relevant experiences you can use as a solid foundation. Here are some examples of things to include on an entry-level registered nurse resume:

• Educational achievements: Include any academic awards or honors recognition you may have received during your time at school.
• Clinical rotations: Leverage the experience gained during the practical portion of your nursing program. This is as close to professional experience as you can get.
• Healthcare-related work: If you’ve worked in any healthcare setting, add that to your resume as well. Any time spent working in a medical atmosphere is something to highlight.
• Volunteer work: Including relevant healthcare volunteer work is another way to bolster your experience section. Volunteer experience is just as impactful as paid work.

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Andrew Stoner

Executive Resume Writer and Career Coach

A resume should be a forward-looking value proposition that showcases your most relevant accomplishments for a target role — not a rear view summary of your previous roles and responsibilities.