Nurse Resume Templates: Complete Guide + Free Examples

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Premium Resumes
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School Nurse
This nurse's resume features warm social skills that make it easy for you to communicate and care for younger patients alongside your specialized training in infant and child first aid. -
Telemetry Nurse
With a growing reliance on 24/7 telemedicine, this resume demonstrates how you can showcase your virtual skills alongside your close attention to detail and strong listening skills. -
Operating Room Nurse
This highly specialized field requires an in-depth knowledge of proper sanitization techniques, surgical draping, and surgical prep work. This resume helps you demonstrate your O.R. knowledge alongside your collaborative skills.
Explore popular templates and create a standout professional resume today.
Free Nurse Resume Templates
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Skills Highlight
This functional resume template dedicates its first page to an in-depth summary statement and three distinct skills sections. Perfect for nurses with specialized training or medical tech skills. -
Classic Plain
This simple chronological nurse resume prioritizes your summary statement and work history. The minimal layout draws attention to the content. This template is ideal for open jobs at established clinics. -
Circle Timeline
This elegant chronological resume uses streamlined design elements to highlight your former jobs. This template is perfect for experienced nurses with over 10 years of experience. -
Blocks
This chronological resume borrows from conventional newspaper structure to create visually separate resume sections. This is perfect for an applicant with over 10 years of experience. -
Shadow Background
This bold resume uses strategic white space and color-blocking to create distinct resume sections. It prioritizes your former work history to help you showcase unique responsibilities. -
Concrete
This chronological resume relies on striking design elements and strategic color-blocking to break up each of your resume sections and create a streamlined narrative of your career. -
Academia
This simple chronological resume uses elegant design elements like playful color schemes, simple borders, and generous white space to elevate your former employment history. -
Deep Blue Technology
This chronological resume borrows from functional resumes to include detailed skills sections. The dedicated skills sections allow you to grade your skills proficiencies to summarize your experience accurately.
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How to Write Your Best Nurse Resume
Although there are three popular resume formats, we’ll teach you how to follow the standard combination resume. This nurse resume combines the best features of its sibling formats to showcase your work history and skill sets equally, rather than prioritizing one set of information over the others.
Pick the best resume format
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Functional resume: Also known as the skills-based resume, this format prioritizes your soft, hard, and technical skills as well as certifications. This resume reduces your work history section to a simple summary of your previous job title, employer, and dates of employment by breaking off your accomplishments and responsibilities into a separate section known as a “summary of qualifications.”
We strongly recommend that you utilize this format if you recently graduated and only have short-length clinical experience. This format will help you showcase your academic training and experience to potential hiring managers. You need to be cautious with this resume format. The unique use of multiple skills sections makes it difficult for applicant tracking systems, or ATS, to parse and analyze your suitability for an open job correctly.
- Chronological resume: This is the most well-known format. Your work history sits near the top of this resume and takes up the bulk of your page length, followed by a brief list of your skills, your education sections, and an optional licenses and certifications section. Although this is the most widely used format, we strongly recommend that you avoid it unless you have over 10 years of nursing experience, have advanced training, or pursued valuable nursing certifications and programs.
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Combination resume: As we mentioned before, the combination resume brings forth the best of the two previously mentioned resumes. Although the resume sections follow the same structural format as a chronological resume, a combination resume switches the placement of the dedicated skills and work history sections so you can lead with your technical skills before describing your professional accomplishments.
This resume is ideal for job candidates with extended academic backgrounds, specialized training, and three to nine years of professional experience. As a member of a highly trained medical professional, it’s the ideal format for your job search.
Helping your skills shine.
If you’re writing a combination resume, your skills section will list six-to-eight job-specific abilities. However, this dedicated section is not the only place where you can strategically share your medical training and personable manner. If you craft a detailed list of your professional skills, you can carefully include additional skills throughout your summary statement and work history, lending additional strength to your resume and application.
To start your nurse resume, we strongly recommend that you create a detailed list of your soft skills (personable skills), hard skills (learned behaviors), and technical skills (highly trained abilities) to carefully choose relevant topics that relate to each open job position you apply to.
We created this specialized list of skills that can showcase your warm bedside manner and certified nursing qualifications:
Soft skills:
- Communication
- Patience
- Listening skills
- Improvisation
- Note-taking skills
- Organizational skills
- Attention to details
- Order and stock supplies
- Collaboration
- Observation
Hard skills:
- Prep and serve meals
- Maintain patient hygiene routine
- Strong stomach
- Record and identify medical concerns
- Ability to lift and move a patient
- Ability to lift or move 100 pounds/patient weight
- Ability to turn, reposition, and transfer patients
- Clean supplies
- Clean and change bed linens
- Sanitize shared or common surfaces
Technical skills:
- Medical observations
- Medical notations
- Measure and monitor patient vitals
- Measure blood pressure
- Measure temperature
- Schedule and monitor medication schedule
- Set up additional patient care
- Explain patient health and recovery regiment
- Operate and/or monitor medical equipment
- Perform and analyze diagnostic tests and results
- Teach patients and/or caretakers at-home medical treatment
Swaying hiring managers with personable summary statements.
Your summary statement is a two or three-sentence introduction that sits directly beneath your name and contact information. This brief paragraph can serve one of two purposes:
- Summary statement: This updated statement ties directly to the needs of an open position. You place yourself as the ideal candidate by showcasing how a specific skill or specialty fills the unique needs of the hiring managers.
- Objective statement: Considered outdated but valuable to recent nurse graduates or career changers looking for nursing opportunities. An objective statement explains what you hope to gain from an open opportunity. In this case, you can share your desire to contribute toward healthy, recovery, and patient support.
You can lend additional sway to this section by carefully featuring one or two relevant skills from the list you previously prepared. Be sure to choose skills that aren’t mentioned under your skills or work history sections, but are related to a specific open position.
Summary statement example:
Building a professional narrative with your work history
Your practical work history helps you add context to your nursing skills by outlining previous employment or volunteer work alongside specific responsibilities and accomplishments related to each former role.
This section will showcase your warm bedside manner, communication skills with your medical team and with patients and their families, and nurse training, including specialized certifications.
A combination and chronological resume follow the same work history structure:
Job Title, Company Name
City, State, MM/YYYY – MM/YYYY
- Description of job responsibilities or quantifiable accomplishments.
- Description of job responsibilities or quantifiable accomplishments.
- Description of job responsibilities or quantifiable accomplishments.
If you’re a recent nurse graduate or switching medical careers to pursue nursing, your functional resume will follow a pared-down section.
Job Title: Company Name
- City, State
- YYYY
Work history example:
Highlighting your nursing degrees and edu
Most education sections follow this same general format:
ACADEMIC DEGREES
Name of University
- YYYY (year of graduation)
- Degree, Major and Minor
As a nurse applicant, you can add depth and detail to your education section by including special licenses and certifications such as your Registered Nurse (RN) license number. For example, you can format this additional information underneath your academic degrees following this layout:
SPECIAL LICENSES
Name of University
Remember, you should tailor this section to contain relevant information, not to pad out your resume. Only add certifications that align with the needs of an open position. Here’s a list of special licenses and certifications that you can add to your education section to offer hiring managers an in-depth understanding of your medical training:
- Basic Life Support Certification
- Advanced Cardiac Life Support Certification
- Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Certification
- Advanced Practice Registered Nurses, (APRN)
- Certified Nurse Assistants (CNA)
- Cardiac Nurse Practitioner
- Certified Nurse-Midwife
- Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist
Here’s a detailed list of additional nursing certifications.
Education section example:
Brace Your Resume With a Cover Letter
Although a nurse resume can give hiring managers a quick, detailed summary of your accomplishments, a cover letter can lend context to your resume as well as showcase your personality. A combined cover letter and resume application can create a stronger indication of your value as an employee and colleague. Our Resume Builder features a matching Cover Letter Builder that can help you create an easy cover letter in minutes.
Build a Cover LetterCreate a Perfect Nurse Resume With Our Builder
With this writing guide in hand, you can visit our Resume Builder and unlock professional resume templates, pre-written content written by certified resume writers, and additional section-by-section writing advice to help you create tailored resumes for every open nurse position.
This simple layout features a traditional font and the clever use of section borders to help each section of your resume stand out.
This distinctive two-column resume template identifies your name and professional experience in a bold color and clean presentation.
A clever design that breaks each of your professional accomplishments into distinct sections while following a format that will pass applicant tracking systems.
The elegant initials, simple header and strategic use of bullet points in this template help keep your professional accomplishments well-organized.
The bold use of a colorblocked heading paired with an elegant resume layout helps your name and contact information stand out.
This structured design combines a two-column approach with bullet points to highlight your key accomplishments and professional history.
A traditional template uses a crisp combination of dark text and thin borders to radiate professionalism. Your name sits prominently above your professional history.
This template’s design features plenty of whitespace neatly divided by gray bars to make the information on your resume easy to read for employers.
This two-column resume conveys a very clear breakdown of its sections that allows a hiring manager to quickly scan your resume.
The subtle color accents in this template add visual pizzazz in a classy way, a great option for most traditional industries.
This resume’s modern design and bold use of color make it pop. Its uniqueness is well-suited to those seeking jobs in creative industries.
Everything about this template is assertive from the boxy layout to its all-caps heading text that gives the impression that you’re all about business.
The understated contact information at the top puts attention front and center on your professional summary, skills, work experience and education sections.
The subtle use of red alongside black gives this template a bold feel while still featuring plenty of white space to make it easy to read.
Customer Reviews
Nurse FAQ
How much does a nurse make in the U.S.?
As many Americans reach retirement age, there’s been an increase in demand for well-trained nurses. Nurses’ salaries vary from state to state and within counties, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that nurses make the following averages across the U.S.:
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National based on industry
- All industries
- General Hospitals
- Specialty Hospitals
- Psychiatric and Substance Abuse Hospitals
- Outpatient Care Centers
- Home Health Care
Average hourly wageAverage annual wage -
Nation based on industryAll industriesGeneral HospitalsSpecialty HospitalsPsychiatric and Substance Abuse HospitalsOutpatient Care CentersHome Health Care
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Average hourly wage$36.22$39.27$39.86$37.14$42.93$36.48
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Average annual wage$75,330$81,680$82,910$77,250$89,300$75,870
How do you write a nursing resume with no experience?
Fortunately for you, most accredited nursing programs require extensive clinical skills labs and real-world clinical courses throughout hospitals, private clinics, and community centers in addition to anatomy, physiology, microbiology, and general psychology academic courses. You can showcase this combination of comprehensive academics and on-the-ground learning to demonstrate practical experience through your certification program.
You can also explain your recent graduation and further explain your practical experience from your academic program in your summary statement. Most hiring managers will appreciate the contest, understand your recent graduation, and request additional references to offset your relative lack of professional experience.
What makes you stand out as a nurse?
The ideal nurse stands out in two ways: Strong technical medical skills and a warm bedside manner. You can stand out by showcasing your ease with patients as well as your extensive medical and nursing know-how.
Should I put my RN license number on my resume?
You should put your RN license number under your education or license and certifications sections. An ideal resume is a detailed summary of your professional qualifications — your RN license number quickly affirms that you’re qualified to pass a state's rigorous examination and application requirements.
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Gabriela Barcenas
Gaby is Hloom’s resident writer, a certified professional resume writer (CPRW), and a baking enthusiast. She likes to defend the use of the functional resume to her friends in HR. She graduated from the University of San Francisco with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing and wrote about career growth, tech startups, education, fashion, travel and lifestyle culture throughout her career.
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