Registered Nurse Resume Example
A full resume for a med-surg RN, annotated — starting with the part most nursing resumes get structurally wrong.
Nursing is one of the few fields where a resume can be rejected for a reason that has nothing to do with the nursing. Before anyone judges your clinical judgement, somebody — or something — has to confirm you hold a current, unrestricted licence in the state where the job is. If that confirmation is hard to find, the rest of the page may never be read.
So this example is organised around that fact, and the annotations explain the ordering rather than the phrasing.
The resume
Danielle Okafor, RN, BSN Columbus, OH · danielle.okafor@example.com · (614) 555-0193
Licensure and certifications
- Registered Nurse, Ohio Board of Nursing, licence #RN-448210, active through August 2027
- Multistate privilege under the Nurse Licensure Compact
- BLS (Basic Life Support), American Heart Association, through March 2027
- ACLS (Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support), American Heart Association, through March 2027
- PCCN (Progressive Care Certified Nurse), AACN, through 2028
Summary
Med-surg RN with three years on a 32-bed adult unit, typically carrying five to six patients on days and up to seven on nights. Precepted four new graduates through orientation. Charge nurse rotation since 2025.
Experience
Registered Nurse, Medical-Surgical — Riverbend Regional Hospital, Columbus, OH July 2023 – present
- Carry a five-to-six patient assignment on a 32-bed adult med-surg unit, with post-operative, telemetry and step-down overflow admissions.
- Took the charge rotation from 2025: assignments, admissions flow, and the escalation call when a patient deteriorates.
- Precepted four new graduate nurses through a twelve-week orientation; all four completed and remain on the unit.
- Sat on the unit practice council that rewrote the handoff checklist after a near-miss review, cutting reported handoff omissions over the following two quarters.
Patient Care Assistant — Riverbend Regional Hospital, Columbus, OH August 2021 – June 2023
- Worked nights on the same unit while completing the BSN, which is how the transition to RN there took no orientation ramp.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Nursing — Ohio State University, 2023 Clinical rotations: medical-surgical, critical care, obstetrics, psychiatric, community health
Why it is written this way
Licensure sits above the summary, not at the bottom
Most resume advice puts credentials near the end, with education. For nursing that is backwards.
A recruiter screening for a med-surg posting is confirming three things before anything else: current licence, right state, right certifications. Putting that block first means the confirmation happens in the first five seconds instead of on the second page. It also means an applicant tracking system that reads top-down finds the terms it was told to look for immediately, in a section whose heading says exactly what it contains.
This is the one place where a nursing resume should ignore the generic template order.
The licence number is written out
Plenty of nursing resumes say “licensed in Ohio” and stop there. Writing the number, the board and the expiry turns a claim into something verifiable — a recruiter can check it against the state board’s public lookup without emailing you first. Removing a step from someone else’s job is a real advantage when they have forty resumes to get through.
The expiry date matters for a second reason: an undated credential reads as possibly expired.
Every certification appears as both the acronym and the full name
BLS and Basic Life Support are different strings. A keyword match configured for one will not find the other, and you have no way of knowing which one a given employer used. Writing both costs four words and removes the guess entirely.
This is also why they are not in a graphic, a badge row, or a two-column sidebar — see how to check if your resume is ATS-friendly for what happens to those when a file is flattened into text.
Clinical rotations are listed because they are recent
A nurse three years in is at the edge of where rotations still earn their space. They stay here because med-surg and critical care are directly relevant to the roles this resume targets. At six or seven years they come out, and the space goes to the unit work.
The rule that generalises: rotations are a stand-in for experience you do not have yet. They shrink as the experience arrives.
The near-miss bullet is the one doing real work
Carrying a patient load is what every applicant on the pile does. Sitting on the council that rewrote the handoff checklist after a near-miss review is not — it says this nurse participates in fixing the system rather than absorbing it.
If you have one of those, it belongs on the page even if it was a committee nobody wanted to join.
On phrasing
This example does not re-explain how to write a bullet as an outcome rather than a duty, or which lines to cut from an old resume. Both are covered in the customer service resume example, and they apply here unchanged.
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