Nursing Resume Template
A nursing resume builder that lays out your licenses, clinical experience, rotations, education and skills as you type, in a plain one-column format that applicant tracking systems read well. Switch to new grad mode to put school and clinical rotations first, or load an example to see a finished nursing resume.
What goes on a nursing resume
Name and credentials
Your name with your credentials after it, such as "Jordan Ellis, BSN, RN", then city and state, phone, email and LinkedIn on one line.
Licenses and certifications
The license type and the state, multistate if you hold one, and the expiration date; then certifications such as BLS, ACLS or PALS with the issuer and expiration.
Clinical experience
Job title, facility, unit or specialty and dates, then three to five bullets that show your workload and results in numbers.
Education and clinical rotations
Degree, school and graduation date. New grads add their rotations with unit, facility and hours, because that is their clinical experience.
Skills
Clinical skills, the EHR systems you have charted in (for example Epic or Cerner) and the languages you speak.
Nursing resume examples
Four worked examples you can load into the template and change. The people and facilities are invented.
Experienced RN (med-surg)
Six years on a medical-surgical unit with relief charge and precepting: work history first, with workload and results in numbers.
New grad RN
Education and five clinical rotations with hours come before a part-time patient care technician job, with the unit the nurse wants named in the summary.
Travel nurse
A multistate license plus a single-state license, contracts grouped under one travel role, and the staff job before it.
LPN
A licensed practical nurse in long-term care: medication pass, team lead on evening shift, and a practical nursing diploma.
How to write nursing resume bullets
Start with an action verb
Cared for, precepted, led, trained, reduced. One line per bullet, and the most impressive one first.
Put a number in it
Beds on the unit, patients per shift, nurses you precepted, people you trained, a measure that moved. Numbers let a nurse manager picture your shift.
Describe the workload, not a person
"Cared for 5-6 patients per shift on a 32-bed med-surg unit" says everything a hiring manager needs. Never put patient names or details in a resume.
Match the posting
Use the unit, the certifications and the EHR named in the job posting, in the same words, where they are true for you.
Hold a multistate license? The Nurse Licensure Compact explains how it works; list it as "Registered Nurse (RN), multistate license" with your home state.
Next steps for your nursing job search: nurse interview questions, tips for new grad nurses, SMART goals for nurses.
The resume gets the call. Practice the interview out loud.
Say your answers to the common nurse interview questions out loud and record them on your phone with ParrotNotes. Read the transcript and the summary afterwards to see what you actually said, and tighten the answers before the real thing. Free for 100 minutes of recording a month.
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