Top 12 Clinical Nurse Skills to Put on Your Resume

A resume that breathes real clinical skill does more than list tasks. It signals sound judgment, steady hands, and sharp thinking in the churn of a hospital shift. Show the skills that translate to safer care, quicker recoveries, and fewer errors—because that’s what hiring managers scan for in seconds.

Clinical Nurse Skills

1. Patient Assessment
2. IV Insertion
3. Wound Care
4. Electronic Health Records (EHR)
5. Medication Administration
6. Basic Life Support (BLS)
7. Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS)
8. Patient Education
9. Telemetry Monitoring
10. Surgical Assistance
11. Infection Control
12. Epic Systems

1. Patient Assessment

Patient assessment is the structured sweep of a patient’s status—physical signs, symptoms, psychosocial context, and risks—so you can map a care plan that fits reality, not guesswork.

Why It's Important

Good assessment catches deterioration early, pinpoints priorities, and tailors interventions. Miss the cues, miss the moment.

How to Improve Patient Assessment Skills

Build sharper, faster, more reliable assessments with habits that stick:

1. Tune your observation: Trend subtle changes—skin tone shifts, work of breathing, new confusion, tiny drifts in vitals.
2. Ask better questions: Use open-ended prompts, clarify timelines, confirm understanding with teach-back.
3. Strengthen frameworks: Practice head-to-toe, focused assessments, and SBAR handoffs until they’re second nature.
4. Use clinical reasoning: Form a quick differential, test assumptions, and reconcile findings with the chart.
5. Leverage technology: Review flowsheets, trend labs, and scan decision-support flags without tunnel vision.
6. Collaborate: Pull in PT/OT, pharmacy, respiratory, and the primary team for a fuller picture.

Consistency beats intensity. Repeat the fundamentals, refine the edges.

How to Display Patient Assessment Skills on Your Resume

2. IV Insertion

IV insertion places a catheter into a vein for rapid access to fluids, meds, and blood draws—done cleanly, secured well, and monitored for complications.

Why It's Important

Timely vascular access enables urgent therapy, reduces delays, and limits repeated sticks that erode trust and veins.

How to Improve IV Insertion Skills

Technique plus preparation wins the day:

1. Pick the right site and size: Match catheter gauge to therapy; respect catheter-to-vein ratio and vein preservation for future needs.
2. Prime conditions: Warm the limb, use gravity or a tourniquet correctly, and optimize patient positioning.
3. Aseptic rigor: Chlorhexidine prep, no-touch technique, and clean securement reduce infection.
4. Refine insertion: Shallow angle, stabilize the vein, pause after flashback, advance smoothly—don’t fish.
5. Secure and protect: Use stabilization devices and transparent dressings; label and date.
6. Manage issues: Distinguish infiltration vs. extravasation; know escalation to ultrasound-guided or vascular access teams.
7. Practice and feedback: Simulation, deliberate practice, and peer coaching tighten consistency.

Comfort for the patient, first-stick success for you. That’s the goal.

How to Display IV Insertion Skills on Your Resume

3. Wound Care

Wound care spans assessment, debridement support, dressing selection, moisture balance, infection control, and prevention of recurrence—covering both acute injuries and stubborn chronic wounds.

Why It's Important

Smart wound care shortens healing time, prevents complications, and preserves function. Poor care lingers; great care closes.

How to Improve Wound Care Skills

Precision over guesswork, always:

1. Use a framework: Apply the TIME principle (Tissue, Infection/Inflammation, Moisture, Edge) to guide choices.
2. Stage correctly: Align with current pressure injury staging (including DTPI and unstageable) and document meticulously.
3. Match dressings to need: Alginates for exudate, hydrogels for moisture, foams for protection, NPWT for complex wounds.
4. Control bioburden: Recognize critical colonization vs. infection; escalate cultures and antibiotics appropriately.
5. Address whole-patient factors: Protein intake, glucose control, offloading, perfusion (consider ABPI) all matter.
6. Consult specialists: Loop in wound care nurses and surgery when trajectories stall.

Document measurements, tissue type, drainage, odor, peri-wound skin, and response to treatment every time.

How to Display Wound Care Skills on Your Resume

4. Electronic Health Records (EHR)

EHRs centralize clinical documentation, orders, results, meds, and care plans so teams can coordinate and act with fewer blind spots.

Why It's Important

Accurate, timely documentation improves decisions, continuity, and safety. If it isn’t captured, it gets missed.

How to Improve Electronic Health Records (EHR) Skills

Make the system work for you, not the other way around:

1. Streamline workflows: Customize favorites, smart phrases, order sets, and flowsheets to cut clicks.
2. Interoperability savvy: Understand shared records, health information exchange, and data reconciliation to reduce duplication.
3. Data discipline: Chart in real time, trend vitals/labs, and use decision support judiciously—alerts inform, they don’t replace judgment.
4. Targeted training: Short, scenario-based refreshers beat long generic courses. Practice upgrades before go-live.
5. Privacy first: Follow minimum necessary access, secure messaging, and precise audit trails.

Clean data in, safer care out.

How to Display Electronic Health Records (EHR) Skills on Your Resume

5. Medication Administration

Medication administration is the precise delivery of ordered drugs—right patient, right dose, right route, right time—paired with monitoring, documentation, and response.

Why It's Important

Meds can heal fast or harm faster. Reliability here prevents adverse events and drives outcomes.

How to Improve Medication Administration Skills

Cut error risk and boost reliability:

1. Practice the rights—consistently: Patient, medication, dose, route, time, and documentation. Verify allergies and indications.
2. Use technology well: Barcode scanning, smart pumps, and clinical decision support reduce slips when used correctly.
3. Double-check high-alert meds: Independent verification for insulin, anticoagulants, opioids, concentrated electrolytes, and chemo.
4. Clarify orders: Resolve look-alike/sound-alike names, unclear PRN parameters, and rate calculations before administering.
5. Monitor and respond: Baselines first (BP, HR, pain score, labs), then reassess effect and side effects with timely documentation.
6. Own reconciliation: At admission, transfer, and discharge, close the loop to prevent omissions and duplications.

Calm, methodical, by the book—especially under pressure.

How to Display Medication Administration Skills on Your Resume

6. Basic Life Support (BLS)

BLS covers high-quality CPR, AED use, and airway support to sustain circulation and breathing until advanced care arrives.

Why It's Important

Seconds matter. Effective compressions and rapid defibrillation flip outcomes from grim to survivable.

How to Improve Basic Life Support (BLS) Skills

Muscle memory wins in chaos:

1. Recertify on schedule: Refresh skills and updates routinely.
2. Drill often: Short, frequent simulations with feedback devices sharpen compression depth, rate, and recoil.
3. Master roles: Rotate compressor, airway, and defib roles; practice swift task switches.
4. Refine team dynamics: Closed-loop communication, clear leadership, and preassigned duties cut hesitation.
5. Debrief every code: What worked, what lagged, what to fix next time.

Good BLS feels automatic and loud with clarity.

How to Display Basic Life Support (BLS) Skills on Your Resume

7. Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS)

ACLS layers advanced airways, rhythm recognition, defibrillation/cardioversion, and pharmacology on top of BLS to manage life-threatening cardiac events.

Why It's Important

Early rhythm ID, minimal pauses, and crisp meds change survival and neurologic outcomes. The margin is thin.

How to Improve Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) Skills

Train like it’s real:

1. Stay current: Know the latest algorithms for VF/pVT, PEA/asystole, brady/tachy with pulses, and post-ROSC care.
2. Scenario immersion: Practice complex cases—electrolyte derangements, STEMI with shock, refractory VF—end to end.
3. Airway proficiency: Bag-mask ventilation first; escalate airway adjuncts smoothly; capnography for quality checks.
4. Rhythm fluency: Read strips fast and accurately; anticipate next steps before the team calls for them.
5. Team choreography: Role clarity, closed-loop commands, and zero compression interruptions.

Speed without hurry. Precision under fire.

How to Display Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) Skills on Your Resume

8. Patient Education

Patient education equips patients and families with the what, why, and how of their care so they can act confidently beyond your shift.

Why It's Important

Understanding drives adherence. Adherence drives outcomes. Confusion does the opposite.

How to Improve Patient Education Skills

Make it simple, make it stick:

1. Assess literacy and barriers: Language, hearing, cultural beliefs, and stress levels shape how you teach.
2. Set clear micro-goals: One or two must-know points per session beat information dumps.
3. Use plain language and visuals: Short sentences, everyday words, pictures, and demonstrations.
4. Teach-back: Ask patients to explain or show the steps back to you; correct gently, immediately.
5. Give actionable takeaways: Written instructions, dosing calendars, red-flag symptoms, and follow-up plans.
6. Reinforce and revisit: Recheck understanding after interventions and at discharge transitions.

Clarity over cleverness. Always.

How to Display Patient Education Skills on Your Resume

9. Telemetry Monitoring

Telemetry tracks cardiac rhythms and other vitals continuously so you can spot trouble early and act before it snowballs.

Why It's Important

Real-time data turns vague hunches into actionable alerts—arrhythmias, ischemia trends, hypoxia—caught in time.

How to Improve Telemetry Monitoring Skills

Reduce noise, amplify signal:

1. Perfect lead placement: Good skin prep and correct positioning reduce artifact and false alarms.
2. Customize alarms: Patient-specific thresholds curb alarm fatigue while protecting safety.
3. Interpret efficiently: Read strips quickly—rate, rhythm, intervals (including QTc), ectopy patterns, ST changes.
4. Close the loop: Correlate symptoms, meds, and labs with rhythm changes; escalate with a tight SBAR.
5. Maintain equipment: Fresh electrodes, charged batteries, and routine function checks prevent blindsides.
6. Debrief events: Review near-misses and significant alarms to refine protocols.

The goal: fewer false alarms, zero missed true ones.

How to Display Telemetry Monitoring Skills on Your Resume

10. Surgical Assistance

Surgical assistance means prepping the room, preserving sterility, positioning patients, anticipating instruments, and supporting safe handoffs from pre-op through recovery.

Why It's Important

Efficient, sterile, well-orchestrated cases lower complications and keep teams focused on the field.

How to Improve Surgical Assistance Skills

Turn the OR into a smooth machine:

1. Sterile technique mastery: Gowning, gloving, field protection, and contamination recovery without panic.
2. Count discipline: Instruments, sponges, sharps—accurate before, during, and after, no exceptions.
3. Anticipate needs: Know the procedure flow, pass instruments cleanly, manage suction and exposure with finesse.
4. Safety checklists: Time-outs, site verification, and allergy/antibiotic confirmation done out loud and together.
5. Optimize patient factors: Pressure-point padding, normothermia, glycemic control, and VTE prophylaxis.
6. Post-op continuity: Detailed PACU handoff with drains, counts, meds, and specific watch-its.

Quiet competence, crisp communication, zero shortcuts.

How to Display Surgical Assistance Skills on Your Resume

11. Infection Control

Infection control brings together hand hygiene, PPE, device care, isolation practices, cleaning, and surveillance to keep pathogens from hitching a ride.

Why It's Important

Transmission in healthcare harms quickly and spreads quietly. Prevention is the cheapest, safest medicine.

How to Improve Infection Control Skills

Make prevention automatic:

1. Hand hygiene without fail: Before and after patient contact, after glove removal, after body fluid exposure, after touching surroundings—20 seconds that matter.
2. PPE with purpose: Right gear for standard vs. transmission-based precautions; correct donning and doffing order.
3. Device bundles: CLABSI, CAUTI, and VAP bundles executed precisely; remove devices at the earliest safe moment.
4. Environmental cleaning: High-touch surfaces and equipment wiped with EPA-registered disinfectants on schedule and after use.
5. Source control: Respiratory etiquette, mask use when appropriate, and patient cohorting when indicated.
6. Antimicrobial stewardship: Cultures before antibiotics when feasible; reassess need and spectrum daily.

Track, trend, and teach—then do it again.

How to Display Infection Control Skills on Your Resume

12. Epic Systems

Epic is a robust EHR platform used for orders, documentation, medication management, communication, and analytics—built to support safer, faster care when customized well.

Why It's Important

Proficiency in Epic speeds charting, clarifies care, and reduces handoff friction. Less time clicking, more time with patients.

How to Improve Epic Systems Skills

Small tweaks, big wins:

1. Personalize tools: Build smart phrases, templates, and preference lists; pin common orders and documentation macros.
2. Tame the In Basket: Create filters, batch similar tasks, and set sane notification rules to prevent backlog.
3. Flowsheet finesse: Chart once, reference often; use summary views and trend graphs to spot changes quickly.
4. Medication safety: Align MAR scanning habits, smart pump libraries, and order validations for tight medication control.
5. Learn updates: Practice new releases in a playground environment and share tips with super users.

Customization turns Epic from cumbersome to crisp.

How to Display Epic Systems Skills on Your Resume