How to Write Your First FNP Resume in 6 Easy Steps
The number of nurse practitioners (NPs) keeps increasing, and currently, there are more than 352,000 licensed NPs in the U.S. Moreover, almost 70% of these nurses are family nurse practitioners. This means that when you’re ready to compete in this job market, you’ll be up against considerable competition, and even the smallest detail can make a difference. FNP resumes are crucial when you’re applying for a job, and this article will guide you through building a family nurse practitioner resume that will stand out.
6 Sections for your FNP Resume
Following a chronological order, a great FNP resume should have the upcoming sections.
1. Contact information
It goes without saying that you first need to introduce yourself. Ensure that you include your full name, email, mailing address, and phone number in your contact information. You can also add links to professional profiles if you want to give your potential employer more information.
2. Credentials
This section of your resume should include your FNP credentials by listing each license and certification you hold, including the name, credential number, and expiration date.
How to List FNP Credentials
American Nurses Credentialing Center suggests that there should be a standard way to list credentials, according to the following order:
Highest earned degree
Licensure
State designations or requirements
National certifications
Awards and honors
Other recognitions
3. Skills
You should add this section of your resume after the credentials section. Your degrees and experience will tell that you are professionally prepared; therefore, try not to rewrite information. Instead, you can include soft skills such as leadership, work ethic, teamwork, and problem-solving skills.
4. Professional experience
Although this may be your first nurse practitioner CV or resume, it’s likely that you already have previous nursing experience, such as working as an RN. Make sure you include any nursing-related working experience, and we suggest that you do this in chronological order. Moreover, you should also include the location, your role, and a short description of what you did and achieved with that role.
Clinical practicum
It’s essential that nurses have the opportunity to link their theoretical knowledge with real-life settings. Clinical practicums do just that, and they’re crucial for skill development, problem-solving, and leadership skills. That said, make sure you include your clinical practicum experience in your FNP resume.
5. Education
Education is an essential part of your professional development and an important section of your resume. This is where you should list all of your degrees in the nursing field. It’s normal for some job seekers to have more than one degree; however, if you’re applying for a nursing job, we suggest you only include your degrees that are relevant to that field, such as Family Nurse Practitioner or Registered Nursing.
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6. Additional sections & details
In order not to overload your resume with many sections, this part serves to include other work-related information that you believe is relevant. Valuable experiences such as training, volunteer work, and different projects that you’ve worked on will only rank you higher in your application; therefore, it’s never a bad idea to include this section in your FNP resume.
How to Make Your FNP Resume Stand Out
If you want to succeed in a competitive job, you have to stand out, and a good FNP resume will help you do that.
Add a summary of your professional experience
According to a study, recruiters spend about 7.4 seconds looking at your resume. However, if you grab their attention, they’ll continue reading. This is why summaries are essential and a decent overview of your professional experience might get you an interview with your potential employer. You can write this summary as bullet points or as a short paragraph. The main thing to consider is that it should contain all the significant achievements of your professional career so far.
Use relevant keywords
Considering the fact that employers deal with tens of resumes every day, they try to make that procedure as quick as possible. To do that, they use keywords to scan resumes and see if candidates are qualified. Keywords are words or phrases that describe a job's requirements, and you can write them as skills, credentials, or job titles.
A great tip for writing excellent keywords is to scan the job description that you’re applying for. These job descriptions usually have common words or short phrases that you can use as keywords in your resume.
Make your resume easy to scan
When dealing with many applicants while vetting resumes, employers tend to skip details and focus on specific information. They can do this manually or by using a technology called Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This ‘robot’ scans your resume searching for specific information. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to follow a chronological order while demonstrating your professional progression.
Add technological skills
It’s essential that nurses have a wide range of technology skills to succeed in their work environment. Amongst other things, nurses may have to use these skills to share patient information, monitor their vital signs, and maintain their records. Nowadays, more and more hospitals are moving towards digitalization by using electronic medical records. Therefore, if you have said skills, make sure to include them on your resume.
Use a clean resume format
Nursing is one of the industries that usually requires a traditional format for an FNP resume. If you want your resume to be aesthetically pleasing and easy to read, you should use a clean resume format. Here here are some ways to achieve that:
Use a black font with white background.
Use text-decoration (bold text, underlined text, italic text).
Adjust the font size (body text should be 12pt, headers can be 14 pt).
Use a readable font, such as Calibri, Times New Roman, or Cambria.
Keep your resume between one and two pages.
Final thoughts
If you’re applying for a job position in the nursing industry, especially as a family nurse practitioner, you’ll be up against decent competition. Job recruiters receive many applications every day, and only the best applicants get to pass the resume screening process. These tips, together with numerous FNP resume examples you can find online, will help you create a resume that will stand out and make a great first impression.