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99+ Essential Nursing Skills for a Resume & Career (Checklist with Examples)
99+ Essential Nursing Skills for a Resume & Career (Checklist with Examples)
To be a great nurse you must have a set of strong nursing skills. But what are they exactly? Read on to find out. And learn which ones are the best nursing skills for your resume.
Great! This guide will help you see if you have what it takes to become a successful nurse.
Already a nurse looking for a job?
Lovely! We’ll show you how to give your nursing skills a proper treatment on your resume.
This article will show you:
A checklist of basic skills required for nursing.
Lists of specialized nursing skills for a resume.
Examples of how to put nursing skills on a resume.
Instructions on how to show off your nursing skills on a resume.
Want to save time and have your resume ready in 5 minutes? Try our resume builder. It’s fast and easy to use. Plus, you’ll get ready-made content to add with one click. See 20+ resume templates and create your resume here.
It’s not enough to simply have the best nursing skills—
You need to put them in the spotlight on your nursing resume.
Here’s a list of popular nursing resume skills for you to consider:
Examples of Nursing Skills for a Resume—List
Administering and monitoring moderate sedation
Appearance/character of urine and stool assessment
Assessing the respiratory system
Care of drains/tubes
Chest tube management
Collaboration and Teamwork
Critical decision-making
Fall risk assessment/prevention
General medicine expertise
IV Therapy
National patient safety goals/core measures
Nebulizer treatments
Obtaining cultures for septic workup (e.g. blood, sputum, catheter tips)
Obtaining peripheral venous blood
Patient rights
Performing complex dressing changes
Restraints/use of least restrictive device
Seizure precautions
Specimen collection
When selecting the right nursing skills for your resume, it’s crucial to focus on the skills characteristic of your specialization.
Take a look at the specialized clinical nursing skills checklist below to pick out your strongest nursing resume skills:
ICU Nursing Skills List
Automatic Internal Cardioverter Defib (AICD)
Cardiogenic/Hypovolemic Shock patient care
Chest Tubes (Pleur-Evac)
Hickman/Broviac/Groshong catheter
Identification and intervention during complications (CSG leak, clot, herniation, tension pneumothorax, aspiration, pulmonary edema, etc.)
Nebulizer treatments
Pain management
Renal failure (acute/chronic) patient care
Seizure precautions
Ventricular Assist Device (RVAD/LVAD) patient care
Visit our ICU Nurse Resume Writing Guide for more examples of intensive care unit nursing skills and step-by-step instructions on how to write a resume.
Certified Nursing Assistant Skills List
Assisting with using a bedpan
Changing bed linen
Radial pulse
Measuring and recording respiration
Catheter care
Electronic documentation
Following care plans
Adaptive equipment and safety devices
Recording vital signs
Mentoring
Check out our CNA Resume Writing Guide to see more examples of CNA nursing resume skills.
Emergency Nursing Skills List
Burn patients
Care of drains/tubes
CCU
ER Level 1 (Trauma)
ICU
Pain management
Specimen Collections
Telemetry/Stepdown
Transport and set-up
Use of hypothermia blanket
Take a look at our ER Nurse Resume Writing Guide for a comprehensive list of ER nursing resume skills.
Med-Surg Nursing Skills List
Administering and monitoring IV anticoagulants
General medicine/surgery expertise
Inserting IVs/IV therapy
IV Certified
Monitoring and assessing I&O
Obtaining peripheral venous blood
Performing complex dressing changes
Using PCA System
Using PICC, Hickman, Central Line
Using SCD or venodyne devices
Our Med-Surg Nurse Resume Writing Guide will not only show you how to make a job winning resume but also offer a detailed Med-Surg nursing resume skills list.
Pediatric Nursing Skills List
Administering and monitoring 02 therapy
Administering blood and blood values
Appearance/character of urine and stool assessment
Assessing the respiratory system
Bowel sound assessment
Caring for child patients with Meningococcemia
Chest tube management
Immunocompromised patient care
Knowledge of Jehovah Witness patient protocol
Obtaining cultures for septic workup (e.g. blood, sputum, catheter tips)
Go to our Pediatric Nurse Resume Writing Guide to explore more examples of pediatric nursing skills for a resume.
Labor and Delivery Nursing Skills List
Application of external ECG/TOCO EFM
Assisting with the insertion of IUPC
Conducting NST/BSST
Emergency C-section set up
Management of fetal demise/stillborn
Pitocin Titration for induction/augmentation
Procedures for prolapsed cord, placenta previa, hemorrhage, shoulder dystocia, etc.
In our Labor and Delivery Nurse Resume Writing Guide, you can see more examples of nursing skills for labor and delivery nurses.
LPN Nursing Skills List
Acute and rehabilitative care
Admitting and discharging
Care plan assessment
Collaboration
Communication
GI feeding and tubes
Meditech documentation
Patient/family education
PICC Line care
Pre-death monitoring
Read our LPN Resume Writing Guide for even more LPN nursing resume skills and a detailed guide on how to write an LPN resume.
Looking for more information on practical nursing resume skills? Check out our nursing resume writing guides for different nursing specializations:
Because job offers attract hundreds of candidates, it's extremely hard for hiring managers to get to the resumes that actually meet the position requirements.
If you don’t want your application to go straight to the rejected folder, you need to make sure you use the right resume keywords to describe your nursing skills for a resume.
How to identify these keywords?
Revisit the job offer and describe your experience and nursing resume skills using the phrases you find there.
For example, your nursing assistant resume skills could be presented like this:
Nursing Assistant Skills for a Resume
Provided patient care assignments as delegated by and under the direction of an RN.
Respected and regarded the dignity of patients, families, visitors, and fellow employees to ensure a professional, responsible and courteous environment.
Cooperated with 3+ department and unit teams inter- and intra-departmentally to facilitate the department's and unit's ability to meet goals and objectives.
This way, you can be sure the relevant keywords are included, and you’ve presented exactly the nursing skills the employer is searching.
But—
You can do even more to give your nursing skills maximum exposure on a resume.
Cherry-pick up to three of your achievements you can quantify and you take pride in and put them in a separate key achievements subsection:
Critical Care Nursing Skills for a Resume
Consistently met high standards of service by achieving an average of over 95% compliance rate.
Won Nurse of the Year Awardby scoring 93% in an internal patient experience survey
If you single out your biggest wins like this, you can be sure your best intensive care unit nursing skills won’t go unnoticed.
Finally—
Put your strongest nursing skills in a dedicated key skills section to draw the recruiter’s attention to your strongest side. The trick is not to populate the section with random nursing skills.
Pick out the clinical nursing skills and techniques that you excel at. Plus, look back at your job description section to pick out the skills you’d really like to show off.
Pro Tip: Select up to 10 key nursing skills to put in your resume’s key skills section. And go for the ones you have a very strong grasp of to avoid Presenter’s Paradox.
And one more thing.
You can also use the objective of a nurse resume to present your nursing skills.
Here’s what it could look like:
Skills Summary for a Nursing Resume
Compassionate and adaptable Registered Nurse with 10+ years of experience in high patient turnover hospital units. Eager to support the Hospital of St John the Baptist with superb organizational and ER nursing skills. In the previous role managed a team of 5 ER nurses in an 18-bed Level-2 Emergency Room.
The resume summary example above proves you can pepper your entire registered nurse resume with relevant nursing skills and sought-after character traits of a nurse. Make sure you put every square inch of your resume to good use and demonstrate your nursing expertise.
When making a resume in our builder, drag & drop bullet points, skills, and auto-fill the boring stuff. Spell check? Check. Start building a professional resume template here for free.
When you’re done, Zety’s resume builder will score your resume and tell you exactly how to make it better.
2
Basic Nursing Skills
It should come as no surprise:
Nursing jobs require you to display a wide array of hard skills, ranging from the knowledge of clinical nursing skills and technical skills to various soft skills. Make sure to highlight your soft skills vs hard skills when applying for your next nursing job.
Some of the most popular nursing clinical skills cover such areas as:
Vital signs (e.g. assessing body temperature, peripheral pulse, apical pulse, or blood pressure)
General health assessment (e.g. using a bed scale, assessing cardiovascular system, etc.)
Patient safety (e.g. fall prevention, various kinds of restraints, etc.)
Asepsis and Infection Control (e.g. preparing a sterile field)
Medications (e.g. administering medications via tubes or injections, or subcutaneous infusion)
Perioperative nursing (e.g. exercises, or recovery room care)
As your nursing career progresses, you’ll come to focus on a particular set of technical nursing skills relevant to your specialization such as ICU nursing skills, or urology nursing skills.
In fact, each nursing profession has its own dedicated nursing skills checklist.
Undeniably, the best nurses are true masters of their craft but—
They also share certain skills and character traits you’ll hardly find on any list of skills required for nursing.
Most of the time you’ll be dealing with the people and patient's family members who aren’t at their best. Your patients could be grumpy, irritated, spiteful, uncooperative, worried, grieving, or in shock. You name it.
And even though you’ll never fully know what you can expect of them, they’ll always expect one thing of you, namely professionalism. And your professionalism will be judged by the way you communicate with others.
Your nursing communication skills are part of a larger skill set, namely interpersonal skills. Keep developing them to become a master communicator.
Critical Thinking Skills in Nursing
Critical thinking skills always come in handy in dynamic situations with lots of variables. Like deciding on the best course of treatment for your patients.
Nurses must be able to think on their feet, weigh in pros and cons, and make informed choices with the patient’s life at the back of their minds. Critical thinking skills in nursing pertain to many different aspects of patient care. From administering medications to making conclusions about the patient’s condition based on the readouts to administering CPR when necessary.
Critical thinking skills consist of several interrelated abilities. You can develop your critical thinking skills in nursing by improving your analytical skills and conceptual skills.
In fact, one study identified prioritization as one of the most crucial factors shaping patient experiences.
Ever-changing situations, issues calling for your immediate attention, large numbers of patients to take care of, and all this happening simultaneously. All these require you to be a master prioritizer, especially if you happen to be working in an emergency room.
It’s impossible to bilocate, but the ability to efficiently allocate your time will take you far. So make sure to keep working on your organizational skills.
Empathy in Nursing
It all starts with empathy.
You do need to have solid clinical nursing skills, but without empathy, you shouldn’t be really considering nursing as a career. The best nurses can relate to the feelings and pain a patient is going through, and channel their compassion constructively, not letting the negative emotions bring them down.
And truth be told, a compassionate nurse who cares is sometimes the only thing a patient needs to get better.
Leadership Skills in Nursing
Nursing leadership skills are a crucial element of a nurse’s professional development.
Just remember, leadership is not about your seniority level. It’s about setting an example, inspiring people into action, building trust, and making others feel safe. This is why leadership and decision-making skills are important in nursing.
Ethics
Strong work ethic has become a bit of a buzzword in modern business.
But the nursing profession is much more than business. It’s a mission. And work ethic is one of the essential nursing skills. A strong belief that your hard work serves the greater good and its value transcends hospital walls is fundamental to being a great nurse.
Attention to Detail
Nursing isn’t for the faint of heart. Nor is it for the careless.
Precision and attention to detail are the nursing skills that can mean the difference between a patient’s life or death. Simple as that.
If you’re unsure of your attentiveness, you can try doing several things to improve your attention to detail.
Confidence
Acting and talking in a confident manner is a sign that you know what you’re doing. And it’s not only a crucial nursing skill. It’s also reassuring to the patients, their family members, co-workers, and other medical personnel.
Healthcare is not a solitary profession, you need to be sure you’re cooperating with a team of professionals. If someone isn’t sure of what they’re doing, the morale of the entire team might get undermined eventually. On the other hand, would you like to be catheterized by a nurse whose voice is faltering and hands are shaking?
Take your time and practice your leadership skills to gain confidence and take your nursing skills to new heights.
Adaptability
When you consider all the skills needed for nursing, adaptability mustn’t go unnoticed.
In fact, adaptability should be every nurse's middle name. Why? If there’s one thing that you could expect in your daily nursing work, it would be the unexpected.
In such circumstances, only the adaptable can thrive, which segues us into the last item on our nursing skills checklist:
Pro Tip: An iCIMS study identified adaptability as the second most desired skill by the employers. Also, adaptability is one of the most crucial employability skills.
Stamina
Even though stamina comes last on our essential nursing skills list, it’s far from being the least important nursing skill.
Quite the opposite. Nursing work is both mentally and physically strenuous, without enough stamina no nurse would be able to go through their working day.
Plus, a great cover letter that matches your resume will give you an advantage over other candidates. You can write it in our cover letter builder here. Here's what it may look like:
Here’s a summary of all you need to know about nursing skills and how to describe them on your resume for nursing jobs:
Nursing skills can be divided into two broad categories: clinical nursing skills and soft skills.
The technical nursing skills are different for each nursing specialization.
Good nurses share certain common soft skills and character traits, such as compassion or adaptability.
It’s crucial to display the relevant nursing resume skills to go past the ATS scan and impress the recruiter.
Do you have any questions about nursing skills? Maybe you’d like to share some tips on how to develop them or show them on your resume. Give us a shout out in the comments below! We’d love to hear from you!
Maciej is a career expert and Certified Professional Resume Writer with a solid background in the education management industry. He's worked with people at all stages of their career paths: from interns to directors to C-suite members, he now helps you find your dream job.
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