How to Include Student Clinicals on Your Nurse Practitioner Resume

Clinical rotations during your Nurse Practitioner program build the skills, knowledge, and confidence you need to practice independently as an NP. That's why it's essential to feature clinicals on your resume.

Your nurse practitioner resume is doing its job if a prospective employer can immediately tell that you're qualified. When you focus on writing your resume to closely align with the job description, you increase your chances of being invited to a phone interview. Applying for your first NP job after graduation? These student clinical resume tips are for you!

List Your Student Clinicals in the Right Order

We recommend that you review the job description and ask yourself where you gained the necessary skills: your previous work experience or your student clinicals? Here are a few steps to follow:

1. Make a list including the department (or unit type if you are an NNP, i.e. Level III NICU, Level IV NICU) and qualifications for each you will apply to.
2. Make a list of departments (units) where you did your student clinicals.
3. Make a list of the departments (units) where you have work experience.
4. List either your student clinicals or work experience first on your resume based on which one is most relevant to the job listing.
5. Adjust the bullets that describe your skills and experience listed under your student clinicals and work experience to highlight the ones that align best with the job requirements.

As you can see, you may have a different resume for each job that you apply to.

Two Real-World Resume Examples

To help drive this home, here are two examples from NP resumes we've recently reviewed. If the job correlates more to the experience in your student clinicals, list it before your work experience. If the opposite is true, simply reorder these two sections. Let's assume you're applying for a pediatric acute care NP job, and your past work experience is in the NICU. During your student clinicals, you spent 240 hours in the PICU. In this case, you'd put your clinical experience first because it aligns with the job role listing. Now, let's say you're a neonatal nurse practitioner applying for a Level IV NICU position. Your previous work experience was also in a Level IV environment, but your student clinicals were at a Level III NICU. In this case, your work experience is more closely aligned to the job role listing and you'd put it first.

This article was originally published on Melnic by Jill Gilliland. Melnic has been acquired by DirectShifts.

If you're currently on the lookout for NP jobs, make sure you create a profile on DirectShifts. Click on the links below to explore and apply for jobs that match your interests and lifestyle:

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