Medical Assistant Resume Template: Complete Guide + Free Examples

Check out our step-by-step guide and create an effective medical assistant resume!

Before jumping into writing the content of your resume, you need to choose the right resume format. Resume formats organize your resume’s information depending on where your strengths and weaknesses lie. The right format for you will maximize the impact of your professional experience and skills.

The chronological format prioritizes your work experience, so if you have a long and steady work history, this format is right for you. This is also the most common format out there, so you can be sure it’s a safe bet if you’re a medical assistant with plenty of previous experience.

The functional format is a skills-based resume. It is ideal for candidates with little to no experience because it puts the focus on your skills and qualifications instead of your work history. Recent graduates who are looking for medical assistant internships or entry-level roles, will benefit from this resume.

With a summary statement, you want to give your potential employer a review of your strongest assets. Your summary statement should be brief but pack a punch. It should mention your desired role and most impressive qualifications, skills, achievements or experience.

For example:

Medical assistants need a wide set of skills, ranging from soft skills such as communication to hard skills like lab testing, and technical skills like proficiency in medical software.

A thorough skills section includes a balance of these three types of skills. The way you organize your skills section depends on the type of resume format you choose. On chronological resumes, the skills section is displayed in the form of a bulleted list.

On combination and functional resumes, you can have multiple skills sections. However, the main skills section should be expanded by including a few bulleted sentences describing how you’ve mastered those skills.

Some skills you should consider including in your medical assistant resume, whether chronological, functional or combination, are:

Your work experience is a list of your previous roles organized in reverse-chronological order — that means you start with your most recent job and work backward. An impressive work history does more than list your daily tasks. It should show how you benefited your previous employer.

You can make your work history more eye-catching by including quantifiable metrics. Instead of saying you helped check in patients each day, quantify the statement with numbers. For example, “Checked in over 20 patients per day.”

Each entry should include the job title, company name, location, and start and end dates. If you’re writing a chronological resume, follow the entry with three to four bullet points detailing your most impressive achievements in the role. For functional resumes, you can disregard the added bullet points since you want to draw attention away from that limited experience.

Check out the following sample:

Your education section includes the name of your degrees, the institution where you studied, its location and your graduation dates.

Medical assistants technically only need a high school diploma and learn through on-the-job training. If this is your case, make sure you leave out your graduation date to prevent hiring bias because of your age.

Since some states require medical assistants to become certified, you can include an added section called Certifications where you include any training or certificates.

Look at this example of an education section for a medical assistant’s resume: