Nursing CV

 Nursing CV

Nursing is not for the faint-hearted or thin-skinned, nor is it for the cold-hearted or callous. It takes a very specific kind of person to be a nurse. So the fact that there have traditionally been shortages in nursing isn’t that surprising. But what might surprise you is the fact that the NMC just reported its largest ever annual increase in registrations.

 

Let that sink in. The largest ever annual increase. Competition is heating up in a big way. This article is here to show you how to write a nursing CV that will keep you ahead of the pack. You’ll find lots of great nurse CV examples and UK-specific advice. Check out the sample nursing CV below.

Nursing CV template

 

Jessica Rogers

RN, NMC PIN: 99A9999A

070 1111 1111

jess.rogers@lcmail.co.uk

linkedin.com/in/jessicarogers

 

Personal Statement

 

Highly-motivated, quality-driven RN with 5+ years’ experience working in hospital, in-patient and out-patient clinic settings. Focused on efficiency without compromising compassion. Achieved an average 4.97 / 5.00 patient satisfaction rating while on a 42-bed ward. Seeking to help the Lux Union Health Centre continue to improve its standard of care even as it dramatically increases its capacity.

 

Work Experience

 

Ward Nurse

The Beeches Hospital, Birmingham

April 2018—present

• Prioritised workload efficiently and effectively, attending to up to 12 patients at a time without incident or critical backlog.
• Interpreted data and clinical information, supporting and supervising 3 junior nurses when required.
• Contributed to the development, evaluation and audit of specialist protocols and guidelines.
• Assisted with the maintenance of stock levels for consumables and drugs through reporting, ordering and receiving items according to policy—never experienced an out-of-stock condition.

 

Staff Nurse

The Birmingham East Clinic, Birmingham

November 2015—March 2018

• Provided excellent evidence-based care for patients, collected 15+ letters and notes of thanks from patients and their families.
• Ensured that care plans and records were up to date and accurate through informal audits that caught up to 15 errors each month.
• Saw to it that 17 new residents were orientated into their surroundings and introduced to residents and staff.
• Planned, implemented and evaluated nursing care for 37 residents in accordance with their needs and within the “named nurse” system.

 

Education

 

BSc (Hons) Adult Nursing (2:1), 2010 – 2015

Birmingham City University, Birmingham

 

Skills

 

• Teamwork: Worked closely with consultants, nursing colleagues and medical staff to provide individualised patient care of the highest standard.
• Leadership: Provided clear leadership to junior colleagues in a visible and highly professional manner, acting as a positive role model.
• Wound management: Competent in the removal of all types of sutures, clips and aseptic dressings.
• Communication: Frequently interacted with doctors in highly dynamic and emergency situations as well as with patients and their families.
• Ability to prioritise workload: Responsible for up 3 ICU patients or 12 POCU patients, able to prioritise duties on the fly and for long periods.

 

Certifications

 

• BLS
• Anaphylaxis
• Safeguarding
• Medication administration

 

Languages

 

• English – Native
• Hindi – Native
• Punjabi – Intermediate

 

Read on to learn how you can make your nursing CV even better than the one above and better than four out of five out there.

 

1. Frame your nurse CV with a personal statement

 

The patients you deal with on a day-to-day basis aren’t necessarily having the best day ever when you meet them. The way you introduce yourself—the first impression you make—can set the tone for the remainder of your interactions.

 

It’s similar when it comes to your nursing CV personal statement: your reader is in a rush and may not be their best, most generous self when they pick up your application. So make a good first impression with a nurse CV personal statement that does just three things but does them well.

 

Your personal statement should introduce you as a nurse: your specialisation and the extent and nature of your experience. It should give an indication of what it is that you have to offer your new employer by showing what you brought previous employers. It should also show how your goals line up with the employer’s.

 

A nursing CV personal statement is only 3–4 sentences and 50–150 words long but you’ll be writing a new one for every new job application you submit, so it’s worth streamlining the writing process. Use the following prompts as a kind of nursing CV template for your personal statement.

 

• What kind of nurse are you? Think professional attributes as well as specialisations.
• How much experience do you have and where did you gain that experience?
• What’s your most impressive/relevant on-the-job achievement?
• What are you hoping to be able to achieve for your employer in this job?

 

It’s becoming increasingly likely that your application will be processed by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before a recruiter even lays eyes on it. Make sure you get past its algorithms by mentioning the employer by name (as it appears in the job avert) as well as the name of the position.

 

Your nursing CV personal statement clearly comes first in your CV, but it’s best that you write it last, or at least towards the end of writing your CV. You’ll be much better equipped to do a good job once you’ve prepared your job descriptions and nursing skills section. So leave it for now and come back to it later.

 

Nursing personal statement example

 

Highly-motivated, quality-driven RN with 5+ years’ experience working in hospital, in-patient and out-patient clinic settings. Focused on efficiency without compromising compassion. Achieved an average 4.97 / 5.00 patient satisfaction rating while on a 42-bed ward. Seeking to help the Lux Union Health Centre continue to improve its standard of care even as it dramatically increases its capacity.

2. Detail your work history the right way in your nursing CV

 

No matter if you’re a fresh graduate or veteran nurse, you remember how steep the on-the-job learning curve is in nursing. Experience is extremely important in nursing—education and classroom training are just there to set you up for all that you’ll learn in a real, bustling and at times chaotic setting.

 

So make sure you capture all that experience in your nurse CV. Stick with a chronological format, which means detailing your work history in reverse-chronological order. This is what recruiters expect to see and what ATSs are set up to filter most accurately.

 

Organise your work history by generating a subheading for each position using this nursing CV template:

 

[Job Title]

[Company Name, Location]

[Dates of Employment]

 

Create up to six bullet points under each subheading thus created. Resist the temptation to simply list duties and responsibilities in these bullet points. Instead, make each point a description of one of your nursing achievements. An achievement is something measurable and quantified. For example, ‘inserted cannulas’ becomes ‘inserted more than 100 cannulas without serious incident’.

 

You can use something like a PAR (Problem, Action, Result) formula, CAR (Context, Action, Result) formula or STAR method to help structure your bullet points. Start each point with a dynamic verb like ‘created’, ‘ensured’ or ‘helped’. It’s totally fine to estimate numbers but keep it realistic and justifiable.

 

If you’re writing a nursing CV without any RN experience, then focus on the volunteer, placement, and other work you did before becoming a Registered Nurse. It all very much counts, and regardless of how you became an RN, you would have accumulated a lot of this experience.

 

Nursing CV sample job descriptions

 

Ward Nurse

The Beeches Hospital, Birmingham

April 2018—present

 Prioritised workload efficiently and effectively, attending to up to 12 patients at a time without incident or critical backlog.

• Interpreted data and clinical information, supporting and supervising 3 junior nurses when required.
• Contributed to the development, evaluation and audit of specialist protocols and guidelines.
• Assisted with the maintenance of stock levels for consumables and drugs through reporting, ordering and receiving items according to policy – never experience an out-of-stock condition.

 

Staff Nurse

The Birmingham East Clinic, Birmingham

November 2015—March 2018

 Provided excellent evidence-based care for patients, collected 15+ letters and notes of thanks from patients and their families.

• Ensured that care plans and records were up to date and accurate through informal audits that caught up to 15 errors each month.
• Saw to it that 17 new residents were orientated into their surroundings and introduced to residents and staff.
• Planned, implemented and evaluated nursing care for 37 residents in accordance with their needs and within the “named nurse” system.

 

3. Keep your nursing CV education section on point

 

Completing a university course is probably the most common way people get into nursing, but it’s certainly not the only way. However, you got your NMC PIN, make sure your nurse CV education section does what you need it to and nothing more. So don’t include any grades or university subjects.

 

List your academic qualifications in reverse-chronological order. You can safely skip mentioning your high school education if you have a post-secondary qualification and some work experience under your belt. Use the following template for both university degrees and other tertiary qualifications:

 

[Degree Type] [Degree Name](Degree Class), [Years Attended]

[Institution Name], [Institution Location]

 

Include an expected graduation date if you’re still studying. If you don’t have a university degree, then use the following templates to detail your high school education:

 

A-levels: [Subject Name 1], [Subject Name 2], [Subject Name 3]

[School Name], [School Location], [Years Attended]

 

[n] GCSEs (including Mathematics and English)

[School Name], [School Location], [Years Attended]

 

where n stands in for the number of GCSEs you completed.

 

NurseCV example education section

 

BSc (Hons) Adult Nursing (2:1), 2010 – 2015

Birmingham City University, Birmingham

4. Showcase your skills in your nurse CV

 

Different nursing contexts require different skill sets. The skills that get you and your patients through a night in A&E aren’t going to be the same skills that keep the residents in a nursing home comfortable and healthy. This means you’ll have to revise your nursing CV skills section with every new application.

 

Sitting down and writing a new one every time you send a CV in will get old very quickly. You can avoid this by creating a master list of nursing skills and then simply copying and pasting from that list as required. This’ll mean only very slightly more work now and a lot less work moving forward.

 

Open a new document and list all the nursing skills you can think of. Then go back and add a sentence onto each skill in which you show, one way or another, that you’ve demonstrated it on the job. Be as specific as you can and quantify what you can. Any skill for which you can’t do this drops off the list.

 

Now go back to the job advert and copy and paste 5–10 skills from your master list into your nursing CV. Be sure to at least cover what the job advert requires. Massage your word choice so that you echo keywords used in the advert. For example, change ‘teamwork’ to ‘team player’ if that’s what they’ve used.

 

Nursing CV skills

 

• Teamwork: Worked closely with consultants, nursing colleagues and medical staff to provide individualised patient care of the highest standard.
• Leadership: Provided clear leadership to junior colleagues in a visible and highly professional manner, acting as a positive role model.
• Wound management: Competent in the removal of all types of sutures, clips and aseptic dressings.
• Communication: Frequently interacted with doctors in highly dynamic and emergency situations as well as with patients and their families.
• Ability to prioritise workload: Responsible for up 3 ICU patients or 12 POCU patients, able to prioritise duties on the fly and for long periods.

 

5. Inject additional sections into your nurse CV

 

You could take two nurses with virtually identical educational backgrounds and work histories with no guarantee that they’d be as good as each other, or that both would make a good fit in a given team. Nursing is a whole-person kind of affair, a lot depends on who you are as an individual.

 

Add extra sections to your nursing CV to better capture the aspects of your professional life and personality that slip straight through categories like recent work history or skills. You could add sections that summarise your professional development efforts, qualifications, certifications, awards, even hobbies.

 

The only rule is that whatever you add has to be relevant to the job at hand. Something that’s always relevant in nursing is the ability to speak languages other than English. This is an extremely attractive trait on the British labour market in general and especially in jobs requiring an empathic approach.

 

Nursing CV examples of additional sections

 

Certifications

 

• BLS
• Anaphylaxis
• Safeguarding
• Medication administration

 

Languages

 

• English – Native
• Hindi – Native
• Punjabi – Intermediate

 

6. Include a cover letter with your nurse CV

 

Paperwork, in one form or another, continues to play a big part in nursing. Even ‘just’ ticking a box here or noting a time there. And with good reason—following procedures, keeping good records, and communicating clearly can mean the difference between life and death. The stakes are not quite as high in your CV.

 

Still, there are certain formal requirements to which you have to adhere. A CV is always accompanied by a cover letter, for example. The only exception is if you’ve been explicitly asked not to include one. If there’s no mention of a cover letter at all, then the default assumption is that you should include one.

 

Luckily, you’re halfway there to having a winning nursing cover letter prepared once you’ve written your nursing CV. A properly structured cover letter will include a standard UK header, appropriate salutation, attention-grabbing opening, impressive showcase of achievements, neat wrap-up and the right sign-off.

 

A good nursing cover letter will end up being around 250–400 words long and should nicely fit on (but never exceed) a single A4 page. End your nursing cover letter with a confident call to action that shows your eagerness to continue to the next stage of the recruitment process.

 

Check and double check—in your nurse CV too

 

There are many aspects of being a nurse that don’t seem to be directly related to health care, like keeping your uniform looking neat and tidy. Attention to detail, organisation and general hygiene are important in preventing the spread of disease and mistakes from occurring. So present the same traits in your CV.

 

Proofread your work until you’re sure there isn’t a single spelling or grammatical error left, and then proofread it again. Use whatever software you’re using to type up your documents as well as any of the readily available software and web apps out there that can help you. Get someone else to look over your work.

 

Leave your personal details (including your NMC PIN) near the top of your CV where they’ll be easy to find. Use plenty of white space as well as subheadings to clearly break your CV down into sections. Choose an understated font like Noto, Arial, Liberation or Calibri and keep the size at a readable 11–12 points.

 

Keep to a one-page maximum, unless you have over 20 years’ experience, in which case don’t go over two A4 pages. Attach your nursing CV and cover letter in PDF, unless asked for something else. Haven’t heard back after a week? Fire off a quick email or pick up the phone and follow up—it can do wonders.

 

CR   ::     https://www.livecareer.co.uk/cv-examples/nursing-cv