Resume

[karabree93]

Hey! I am have been an RN for the past year on an acute care floor. I am planning on trying to advance my career and want to apply to the ED. I am just curious what should be added to a resume for someone with one year experience. Should prior jobs and nursing school experience be included?

[Nurse Beth, MSN]

Nursing school experience (as in listing clinicals) should be limited to new grad resumes and then only if they wish to highlight a capstone experience. Otherwise it's a given that they attended clinicals.

Nursing school experience doesn't have a place on a resume once you have experience.

Do include prior jobs since you only have one year work history, to show reliability and maybe to highlight some transferable soft skills, such as customer service. Best wishes!

[Atl-Murse]

If you are applying for RN jobs, list RN experience. I don't care about your part time job washing dishes at Taco Bell, or your school clinical rotation at a daycare. More is not always better. More random junk on your resume may made you look like Bull-crapper, not who I want in the ED.

[llg, PhD, RN]

One exception I would suggest to the above recommendations. If you have some significant nursing school experience that is really relevant to the ED, I would include that. For example, if you did a cap-stone experience in the ED, then worked in general med/surg floor, I would include the cap-stone experience in my resume. Some specialty units really like to hire people who have spent time in a unit similar to their own -- even if that experience was as a student. They want to know that you know what you are getting into and are prepared for what you will encounter in that job.

I work for a children's hospital -- and we are always interested in what experience our applicants have with working with other people's children -- even if that was in a daycare center or after-school program a couple of years ago. The previous experience working with other people's children is almost always considered a plus.

So if you have any experience directly related to ED, I would include that. I also like to see a person's work history -- even if it not nursing. But I just want to know what the job was and how long you held it. I don't need to see a full description of the job responsibilities you had when you worked at McDonald's. One line per job is usually plenty to show me that you were a reliable employee and could hold onto those jobs.