The role of a travel nurse is one that requires candidates to possess a unique blend of medical knowledge, interpersonal skills, and an ability to adapt to new work environments every several months as they move on to a new position in a new location. As such, crafting a well-rounded travel nurse resume that is reflective of your unique skill set can be a difficult task.
A well-structured resume not only showcases your clinical skills and experience but also highlights your adaptability and enthusiasm for new challenges. Whether you’re an experienced professional or relatively new to the travel nursing field, understanding how to effectively present your qualifications can make all the difference in landing your next job. In this guide, we’ll take you through the essential elements and best practices for writing a compelling travel nurse resume that captures the attention of recruiters and hiring managers alike.
Travel Nurse Resume Example
What to Include on a Travel Nurse Resume
Including the right information on your travel nurse resume is key to showcasing your most relevant and impressive qualifications. A well-crafted resume not only highlights your strengths effectively but also boosts the likelihood that hiring managers or recruiters will notice it. Here’s a guide to the essential details every travel nurse resume should feature.
To begin, it is always important to include your up-to-date contact information, including your full name, phone number, email address, and current location. You should also include headings to denote each section of your resume. Not only does this make it easier to scan, but it also helps to organize your resume into distinct sections.
Information you should be sure to include on your travel nurse resume includes:
- Professional summary – A brief overview of your nursing experience, highlighting your skills, specializations, and other qualities that make you a great candidate for a travel nursing position.
- Skills and qualifications – Include specific nursing skills and qualifications. This can include specific skills like patient assessment, IV therapy, and interacting with electronic health records systems, as well as soft skills specific to travel nursing, like adaptability, rapid onboarding, and teamwork.
- Work experience – Include detailed descriptions of previous nursing positions. Be sure to focus on duties, accomplishments, and any travel nursing experience. It is important to include the names of both hospitals and agencies, along with dates of employment and the types of units worked in.
- Licenses and certifications – List all relevant nursing licenses, including state licenses and certifications (e.g., BLS, ACLS, PALS), along with their expiration dates.
- Education – List the degrees you’ve earned along with the institutions from which you earned them and graduation dates. Including any specialized training or continuing education relevant to your nursing career can also be helpful.
Additional Travel Nurse Resume Best Practices
In addition to providing the above information, there are certain formatting choices and other best practices that can help your resume reach the correct people. These include:
- Optimize your resume with relevant keywords – Many employers use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to screen resumes for specific words and phrases. Including relevant keywords can ensure your resume is not overlooked in this process.
- Use easy–to-read formatting – Hiring managers look through hundreds of resumes per day. Making your resume easy to read with a commonly used font and individual sections will help your resume stand out.
- Use bullet points – Again, as hiring managers often skim resumes to get an initial understanding of a candidate’s qualifications, using bullet points helps to highlight your best qualifications, experience, and skills.
- Customize your resume for each job – While the exact responsibilities of a travel nurse might change depending on the contract, it is important to tailor your resume to reflect the experience and skills that make you well-suited to travel nurse roles.
- Use action words – Action words help you to appear more dynamic. It is important to include what you have accomplished in past roles.
- Provide metrics and numbers – Your resume is essentially a sales pitch for you. By including positive metrics due to your contributions, hiring managers get a better understanding of the concrete value you can bring to a role.
- Proofread carefully – Last, but certainly not least, thorough proofreading is important to ensure you’ve not committed and spelling or grammatical errors. Such mistakes can give hiring managers an instant reason to reject a resume, no matter how well put together it is.
Travel Nurse Resume FAQs
FAQ: What skills should I include on my travel nurse resume?
Skills are one of the most important aspects of getting your resume noticed. However, it can be difficult to discern which skills need to be included and which you can omit. We recommend including a mix of both the hard and soft skills that make you an excellent candidate for travel nurse positions.
Hard skills might include:
- Health care documentation
- Patient health assessment
- Vital signs monitoring
- Patient and family relations
Soft skills might include:
- Adaptability
- Problem-solving
- Time management
- Critical thinking
FAQ: How long should my travel nurse resume be?
Basic rule of thumb dictates that your resume should be between one and two pages, depending on your experience. While it is important to be concise and to the point, experience candidates may not find it feasible to fit all of their experience on a single page.
We recommend that an entry to mid-level travel nurses keep their resume to one page in length. More experienced travel nurses may have a two or even three page resume. Your goal should be to create a concise resume that conveys your strengths and experience without being a burden on the reader.