So, you’ve built a solid resume that adequately represents who you are as a nurse. You’ve sharpened your professional summary, created a “Skills and Accomplishments” section that highlights your expertise, and you’ve made the “Experience,” “Education,” and “Licenses and Certifications” sections shine. What next?
While no single enhancement will be the silver bullet that puts your resume over the top, you should consider the cumulative effect of the many elements of a strong resume. Explore those overlooked resume sections that can make your resume come alive.
1. Upgrade Your Resume
If your resume demonstrates who you are as a healthcare professional, looking for ways to upgrade, enhance, or otherwise massage your resume to the next level is wise. After all, when push comes to shove in a competitive job market, those extra touches can make your resume stand out.
Even though resumes are most often considered tools in your job search toolkit, they can also be crucial for applications to graduate school, various types of fellowships and grants, and opportunities such as presenting at conferences. Resumes serve many purposes, and it’s wise to have yours looking sharp and ready for anything that might come along.
2. Community Service
Community service and volunteerism may not seem like a big deal to you. Still, involvement in such “extracurricular activities” paints a picture of a well-rounded individual who takes their place in society seriously.
Volunteerism serves many purposes: it strengthens the fabric of communities, benefits organizations and groups that rely on people’s power to get things done, and brings together individuals who work on common goals for the good of the whole.
If you decide to apply to graduate school or perhaps ask to be accepted for a fellowship or grant, a robust list of how you’ve been involved in various types of community service over the years could strengthen your case.
3. Publications
Having your name on a piece of published writing in a professional journal is an excellent addition to your resume, and it’s a false opinion that getting published is a pipe dream for the average nursing professional interested in writing, researching, or communicating their perspective.
Having an article published in a professional journal is an honor, whether that journal publishes solely online or in print format.
While some academic journals might only be interested in writing by a nurse with an advanced academic record of degrees and other accomplishments, some publications accept manuscripts from boots-on-the-ground nurses.
Remember that findings from even a small study done in your ICU can be worthy of an article revealing your conclusions. For example, research done on the impact of nosocomial infections of a new procedure for urinary catheterization can be worked into a solid piece of professional literature.
Original writing and research have a place in the world, and some editors would be interested in your ideas, whether you’re working by yourself or with a group of colleagues. And each professional participant in that endeavor can add that publication to their resume.
4. Presentations
Nursing and healthcare conferences allow professionals to display posters or give talks presenting the findings of their observations and research. The results from the study above on nosocomial infections in an ICU can be transcribed onto a large-format poster that could be accepted for presentation at a professional conference. Subsequently, that poster presentation or talk could also be included on your resume.
5. Affiliations and Memberships
It may seem insignificant to be a member of a local, state, regional, national, or international nursing organization, but listing your memberships on your resume adds something to the overall picture of who you are as a nurse.
If you hold elected office or participate in particular activities of an organization (e.g., you’re a member of the Government Relations committee, or you sit on the board of your state nursing association), this is a feather in your cap that absolutely belongs on your resume.
6. Committees and Other Workplace Activities
Do you participate in shared governance, facility-wide research, or other activities in your workplace? Taking part in committees, research, or working groups can be added to your resume to show how you do more than the minimum expected. Employers are interested in employees who give back to the workplace community.
Your resume is a living document that is a perpetual work in progress. To infuse your resume with life, get involved in professional activities that add breadth and depth to your overall career history. This adds color and vibrancy to your resume and others’ view of you as a curious and dynamic professional interested in being the best version of yourself that you can be.
It’s difficult to imagine there was ever a time that health care workers were not in demand. As the population grows and people are living longer, it is becoming a struggle to keep up with even the most basic requirements of the country. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has predicted a 16% growth in health care employment opportunities by 2030, which it states is faster than any other industry. Throw into this the pressures of the pandemic and a widening skills gap, and you have a great many understaffed facilities.
While this is a concerning state of affairs, it also presents opportunities. Whether you’re about to graduate from college or have already started your health care career, there are chances for advancement.
We’re going to take a moment to review a few of the elements you should be focusing on as you forge your future in health care.
Clarify Your Goals
To advance your health care career in an empowering way, you need to make sure you’re not simply reacting to the industry’s needs but have a personal plan of action. This begins with clarifying what your career goals are.
This doesn’t necessarily have to begin with a specific job title. Treat clarifying your goals as a process of discovery. Consider first what you want from your job. Aside from the opportunity to help people, which is something shared by most health care workers, think about what areas of the industry interest you the most. This could be a field of care or the types of skills you’re interested in using on a day-to-day basis. Another part of choosing a career path is the lifestyle it provides you. Aside from a higher salary, you may be more interested in a role with a safer environment. Or you may be prioritizing more flexibility or control over your schedule, like travel nursing.
As you narrow down what you want from a career, it can then be useful to move on to what doors specific qualifications can open for you. If you’re already in nursing, following a doctor of nursing practice course can give you access to various lucrative leadership positions. Some of these careers, like family nurse practitioner and psychiatric health nurse practitioner, may be familiar to you already. Others may be slightly more unexplored, like being a nurse educator or taking on administrative positions. Looking further into what options each qualification could offer not only highlights careers but also gives you a road map to bring your closer to the role.
Consider Your Current Skills
It’s important to remember advancing your career isn’t just predicated on learning new skills. One of the great things about having established yourself to a certain extent in the health care sector is you’ll likely already have some transferable abilities. As such, you should take the time to review what these are and where they might be considered valuable.
Your technical skills may be the most obvious place to begin here. After all, these are usually the aspects denoting your suitability in certain medical fields. However, it can be easy to overlook just how vital and attractive your soft skills can be in a variety of roles. If you’re a registered nurse, thinking about which abilities you use in a typical day — digital tool usage, organizational processes, empathy, and leadership among them — can be a useful place to start. It’s also worth talking to colleagues and friends in fields you’re interested in pursuing to understand what soft skills are in demand.
Having a good handle on your range of skills is also an important component in shaping your resume in a way to capture the interest of the right health care industry employers. It’s worth considering that, contrary to other professions, employers in nursing have a preference for skills-led resume structures. As such, you need to professionally format your resume and make it easy for applicant tracking systems (ATS) to ascertain you have the relevant hard and soft skills for a role and pass you through to the human decision-makers. Avoid bulking up your application with a lot of irrelevant skills and experiences. This can just confuse matters and lead to you missing out on the next step of your journey.
Preparing Yourself
Benjamin Franklin’s expression, “failing to prepare is preparing to fail” may seem a little hackneyed. However, it can be appropriate when you’re trying to advance your career in health care. There are some forms of preparation that can help set you up not just to gain the position you want but also to confirm you’re targeting the right career.
One of the most important forms of preparation is gaining a practical sense of the position you’re pursuing. Let’s face it, no job in health care is exactly as the standard job description would have you believe. When you’re already working in health care you’ll likely have contacts that can help you to shadow a professional in your intended field and get a real idea of what the work, atmosphere, and pressures of the environment are like. This can either solidify your commitment to following your path or help you avoid working yourself into a role you’ll be miserable in.
Once you’ve clarified that this is the career you want, one of your next areas for preparation is the interview process. Getting nervous or not having access to the right responses is a common way people trip up. Even in health care, most interviews will include a selection of standard questions; some surrounding your behavior on the job, others about your personality and workplace fit. Take the time to look into the ideal responses to these and practice these in a way that is genuine and relevant to the role you’re applying for. This may well be your best chance to make a good impression, so make the most of it.
Conclusion
The combination of the growing demand from patients and the challenges of COVID-19 has opened job opportunities in health care. When you’re advancing your career in the field you must take care to understand what your goals are and how you can utilize your current skills to define a meaningful path for yourself. These steps, alongside some key preparations, can help make certain your progression is successful.
Whether you are a recent graduate hitting the job market or an experienced nurse looking for something new, a polished resume is one of your best assets.
But how do you know exactly what makes a polished resume? Is it worth it to do it on your own or is it better to hire someone and have it professionally done?
There are a few ways to achieve the end goal of having a resume that fits you and that includes both your work history and your personality. While a resume needs to be clean and polished and, yes, fairly short, that doesn’t mean it has to be boring.
1. Do It Yourself
There’s no law saying you have to have someone else do your resume. Plenty of people write their own resumes and do them expertly enough that no one could tell it wasn’t professionally done. If you choose to do your own resume, make sure you take the time to look online at sample nursing resumes. Get an idea of what they should look like, sound like, and what you should include or leave off.
And it should go without saying—the more eyes on your resume the less chance there is of a spelling error or an incorrect word slipping though. Read your resume out loud to catch anything that could sound odd. Double check all your dates and make sure your titles are correct.
2. Visit Your School’s Career Counseling Office
If you’re a new nurse, your best option is to head straight over to your college’s career counseling center. Not only do they know what a good resume looks like, but they know what employers are looking for in new grads. They will help you figure out what extracurricular activities will help show your job preparation and which ones you should just leave off.
Even if you have been out of school for 20 years, you alma mater’s career counseling office will usually help you out without any cost. This is a huge benefit many people forget about, but one that’s very helpful. And nursing schools know nurses – not everyone gets it in the same way.
3. Pay a Pro to Do It
If you have a lengthy resume with lots of complicated or leadership positions, hiring a pro who is familiar with nursing resumes is a good idea. A pro will keep your resume short enough to keep it out of the automatic slush pile, but informative enough to include all the important details. They know the key words employers are looking for and will use them in the right places.
If you’re at a high level and going for a competitive role, hiring a pro can elevate your experience and increase your job prospects. And pros often keep resumes on file, so they can work with you through the years as your career changes.
No matter what method you choose to have your resume written, make sure it’s the best one for you. Pick the choice that’s most comfortable and effective.
Good luck!
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