Nurse Resume: Example, Skills and License Tips

1. Contact details: name, phone, professional email, city and state, and a LinkedIn URL if it is up to date. No photo, date of birth or other personal details: US employers don’t expect them.
2. A professional summary of two or three sentences.
3. Work experience, most recent first, with bullet points that show results, not just duties.
4. Licensure: “Registered Nurse, [State], active” with the expiration date. Add multistate status if you hold a Nurse Licensure Compact license.
5. Certifications: BLS, ACLS, PALS or specialty credentials, with the issuing organization and expiration date.
6. Education: ADN or BSN, school and graduation year. New graduates should add their clinical rotations.

Name the unit and setting in every role (Med-Surg, ICU, ED, L&D, outpatient clinic, long-term care) and your usual patient ratio. Nurse recruiters filter by specialty first, so make it impossible to miss.

Replace the unit, hospital type, patient load and credentials with yours. If you are a new graduate, lead with your degree, your NCLEX status and your longest clinical rotation or preceptorship.

Under each job, write three to five bullets that start with an action verb and say what changed because of your work. The numbers below are examples: use your own.

If you don’t have exact figures, describe the result without one, or use a range you could explain in an interview.

• Patient assessment, care planning and documentation
• Medication administration and IV therapy
• Cardiac monitoring and rhythm interpretation
• EHR systems such as Epic, Oracle Health (Cerner) or Meditech
• Patient and family education, discharge planning
• Infection control and fall prevention
• Communicating with patients in another language, if you speak one

• RN license from your state board of nursing, granted after passing the NCLEX-RN. LPNs and LVNs take the NCLEX-PN. List the state and expiration date.
• Nurse Licensure Compact (multistate) license, if you hold one: it matters for travel and telehealth roles.
• BLS from the American Heart Association or the American Red Cross; ACLS and PALS where the unit requires them.
• Specialty certifications such as CCRN (critical care), CEN (emergency) or CMSRN (medical-surgical), with the certifying body.
• Associate Degree in Nursing (ADN) or Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN); MSN if you have one.

Without paid nursing experience, your clinical rotations are your experience. List them in their own section with the facility, unit and hours, and add one or two bullets about what you did, especially in your final preceptorship. If you worked as a CNA, patient care tech or unit secretary during school, list that too: it shows you know how a unit runs.