newly qualified

Hello, I am practicing in the UK.

Hello and thank you, I will be practicing in the UK.

Thank You.

Hi! I am a newly qualified paediatric nurse. What kinds of things do you think i should put on my personal statement to make me more attractive to employers? I am thinking of applying on a cardiac ward at Great Ormond Street Hospital as I really loved it while I was on placement, but I hundreds of people would apply for it and I really want to make my application stand out. Thank you.

Did you start applying for jobs during your last year of uni? Most students tend to do this in their last six months of uni before registering so that you move from being a student to NQ nurse as seamlessly as possible.

With applying through the NHS, one of the most important parts of the application is your supporting information, this is like your personal statement that you will have written to get into university. You need to show in this that you meet the parts of the person specification that are assessed in the application form, if you don't show this then then it's likely they won't filter your application for interview. You also need to show, early on in this statement why you're interested in that specific clinical area and what relevant experience you have (placements can count towards this) to this clinical area.

Are there jobs available where you want to work now? If not, it's worthwhile finding employment elsewhere in the meantime, while you wait for your dream job to come up, just like CVs, gaps without any explanation don't look good, getting stuck into a job and consolidating your training and moving into your preceptorship will show that you have the drive to move forwards with your career, rather than sitting on your bum waiting for that dream job to advertise.

Make sure you have a portfolio ready for interview, you don't need to take your entire student portfolio in, make a slimmed down version, make sure you just put all the good "look at how supermegawesome I am" stuff in there, find stuff from uni that may be relevant to the job you're applying for, an assignment that's relevant to where you want to work is helpful if you've done one, so that the interviewers get to see this. Your interview is your chance to show to them why you're the person for the job, they're interested enough in you to invite you to interview, so you stand a good chance of getting the post.

With applying for GOSH, while it's possible there will be a high number of applicants, because it's London there tends to be quite a high turnover of staff (lots of people moving through, either to continue careers elsewhere or because of the high cost of living there) so it's likely jobs will regularly come up.

I hope some of this helps. Good luck.

thank you very much for your reply. It helped a lot.