10 Nursing Resume Skills That Will Make You Stand Out

There is a significant demand for nurses in the U.S. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) anticipates a 6% job growth rate from 2022 to 2032, including approximately 177,400 new jobs for registered nurses (RNs). Despite this, landing a nursing job — whether it’s your first RN job or the next step in your career — is a competitive process. This is because healthcare employers must ensure they only hire highly qualified nurses who provide exceptional patient care.

At Felician University, we are dedicated to supporting our students in achieving successful nursing careers. Students enrolled in the Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing (ABSN) program gain a solid foundation in nursing and are equipped with the tools they need to excel in their careers.

To make yourself stand out as a competitive applicant, you need a strong resume that showcases your experience and includes the top nursing resume skills healthcare employers are looking for. Below is a list of the top hard and soft skills you should include on a nursing resume.

Essential Hard Skills for a Nursing Resume

Your nursing resume should include both hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are nursing-specific technical skills, while soft skills are general qualities that significantly benefit a nursing career. The most important hard skills for a nursing resume include:

1. Fundamental Patient Care Skills

Patient care is at the heart of a nurse’s skill set. Some of the most important nursing resume skills include fundamental patient care skills and knowledge, such as:

• Patient assessment
• Vital signs evaluation
• Exam and treatment assistance
• Care planning

2. Patient and Family Caregiver Education

Nurses are both caregivers and educators, not only providing care but also empowering their patients and family caregivers with necessary health literacy and medical information. Nurses must explain medical diagnoses, treatment options and management in a straightforward and easy-to-understand, yet compassionate manner.

3. Patient Safety and Infection Control

Patients go to hospitals to heal, yet sometimes they acquire infections or even injuries during their hospital stays. Hospital-acquired infections and injuries from events like falls are usually preventable. Healthcare employers need their employees to be well-versed in upholding the highest standards of patient safety and infection control.

Your RN skills for a resume should include items such as:

• Fall prevention
• Physical mobility assistance
• Infection prevention
• Medication accuracy

4. Healthcare Technology Skills

One of the top hard skills for a nursing resume is healthcare technology literacy. The healthcare field continually innovates medical technology, and nurses must remain at the forefront to provide the best possible patient care. Potential employers want to ensure you understand how to use healthcare-specific software and possess tech-related skills such as:

• Electronic health record (EHR) maintenance
• Equipment setup and usage
• Patient documentation

5. Patient Transport

Patient transport skills encompass several areas, including knowing how to safely move patients around the hospital in a bed or wheelchair and transporting them to a car upon discharge. Patient transport skills also touch on patient and family caregiver education, as you may need to know how to teach patients to safely use crutches, walkers or wheelchairs.

Essential Soft Nursing Skills for a Resume

For nurses, soft skills are just as important as technical skills. The main difference between soft and hard skills is that soft skills are transferable and useful across a wide range of industries, whereas hard skills are typically industry specific. Additionally, hard skills are developed through education or training, whereas soft skills are developed and refined gradually over time and relate to an individual’s personality traits.

Some of the most important soft skills for nurses include:

6. Communication Skills

Communication skills are fundamental for nurses — from collaborating with colleagues to helping patients make informed medical decisions — and are essential to include on a nursing resume.

Communication skills include:

• Active listening
• Verbal communication
• Written communication
• Nonverbal conversation cues (e.g., facial expressions and body language)

7. Teamwork

Healthcare employers know that a hospital’s work culture is essential to its success. A positive work culture that fosters transparency, support and collaboration contributes to better patient outcomes and higher staff retention rates. Therefore, teamwork is one of the nursing resume skills that healthcare employers may want to see.

8. Attention to Detail

Medical mistakes can cause serious, sometimes even fatal, harm to patients. In fact, they are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., with about 400,000 hospitalized patients experiencing harm from preventable medical mistakes each year.

Given this context, attention to detail is critical for nurses across every specialty and practice area. Paying meticulous attention to every detail and frequently double-checking information are essential for reducing incidents.

9. Time Management

Another top RN skill for a resume is time management. Although scheduling can vary according to nursing specialty and work setting, nurses are typically busy professionals. During each shift, nurses must juggle the care needs of multiple patients and ensure each one receives sufficient attention and personalized care. Healthcare employers want to know you can manage your time wisely and utilize smart strategies like task batching.

10. Ethics and Professionalism

Nurses must conduct themselves with strict professionalism during their shifts while also showing compassion and empathy to patients and coworkers. Healthcare employers need to know that the nurses they hire will strictly adhere to nursing ethics at all times, including patient confidentiality standards.

How to Write a Nursing Resume

Now that you know some of the top nursing skills for a resume, it’s time to take a closer look at how to write a nursing resume. There are plenty of free templates and examples available online that you can refer to when structuring your resume.

Below are four tips to help you create a professional and competitive nursing resume.

1. Customize Your Resume for Each Application

You’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few RN skills for a resume to include. Since your resume must be concise, you cannot list everything. However, two-page resumes are common for experienced nurses. The best approach is to customize your resume for each job application by listing the skills that are most relevant to the job description.

For example, if you’re applying for a job in a nursing home, you can emphasize your emotional intelligence, patience and attention to detail as soft skills, as well as your patient transport, patient safety and infection control as hard skills.

Similarly, hospice nursing jobs value compassion and patient and family caregiver education, while emergency medical evacuation flight nursing jobs look for nurses who can think on their feet, are skilled at stabilizing critical patients and can prioritize and delegate tasks.

2. Write a Clear and Specific Objective Statement

It is best practice to include a clear and specific mission statement, also known as an objective, on each nursing resume. Again, this should be personalized for each job application. The objective is a brief, concise statement that explains your career goals and professional values. This also gives you an opportunity to mention the most relevant nursing skills for the specific job.

Here’s an example of an objective statement that highlights your nursing resume skills:

Compassionate nursing graduate with two years’ clinical internship experience seeking opportunities to continue developing patient care skills in long-term care settings. Looking for a position in which I can apply my emotional intelligence and attention to detail across all areas of evidence-based care, from patient transport to infection control protocols.

You’ll notice that a typical objective statement doesn’t necessarily use complete sentences but does use punctuation. This is customary and expected. Limit your statement to no more than three sentences.

3. Emphasize All Accomplishments and Be Specific

Throughout your resume, take advantage of all opportunities to highlight your accomplishments. Be concise and specific when describing them. For example, you could list specific experiences you had at various medical facilities, along with the technical or soft skills you learned or honed during those experiences.

4. Proofread Multiple Times

Although your objective statement can stray a bit from proper grammar, the rest of your resume should not. Check and double-check every single word for spelling errors and other mistakes.

Start Your Nursing Journey at Felician University

If you are not quite ready to develop your nursing resume but are looking forward to a future as a nurse, then you can build a solid foundation for success at Felician University.

Our comprehensive curriculum is designed to help students learn the necessary technical and soft skills for nursing success. Furthermore, you might not need to return to school for four more years to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN).

Instead, if you have a non-nursing bachelor’s or at least 60 non-nursing college credits, you may be eligible for our Hybrid or On-Ground accelerated BSN program, which combines online or in-person coursework — depending on your chosen program — with in-person experiential learning and allows you to earn a BSN in as few as 16 months. Contact an admissions counselor today to get started.