Top 12 Professional Nurse Skills to Put on Your Resume
Nursing leans on both steady hands and clear heads. What you show on a resume should mirror the reality of practice: technical chops braided with empathy, judgment, and crisp communication. Below you’ll find core professional nurse skills that align with current standards and help you stand out when it counts.
Professional Nurse Skills
- Patient Assessment
- Wound Care
- IV Therapy
- Electronic Health Records (EHR)
- Basic Life Support (BLS)
- Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS)
- Patient Education
- Medication Administration
- Infection Control
- Telemetry Monitoring
- Palliative Care
- Epic Systems
1. Patient Assessment
Patient assessment is the deliberate, ongoing gathering and interpretation of data—history, physical exam, vitals, labs, and patient preferences—to map what’s happening and guide a plan of care that actually fits the person in the bed.
Why It's Important
Good assessment catches risk early, directs interventions, and personalizes care. It’s the front door to safety and outcomes, the difference between guessing and knowing.
How to Improve Patient Assessment Skills
Sharpening assessment blends practice with reflection and better tools:
Tune your observation: Inspect, auscultate, palpate with purpose. Track subtle changes—skin tone shift, new confusion, a quiet wince—that hint at decompensation.
Ask better questions: Use open prompts and silence to let patients speak. Verify with family or caregivers when history is thin.
Strengthen clinical reasoning: Link findings to pathophysiology. Build short differentials and rule in/out swiftly.
Use technology wisely: Trend vitals, integrate monitor data, review EHR histories; let data inform, not overwhelm.
Close the loop: Reassess after interventions. Did that change in position or medication dose do what you expected?
Practice empathy: Comfort opens candor. People share more when they feel seen.
Do this consistently and your plans get tighter, safer, faster.
How to Display Patient Assessment Skills on Your Resume
2. Wound Care
Wound care means thorough assessment, smart dressing selection, pain control, and vigilant monitoring to prevent infection and speed healing—always aligned with the patient’s nutrition, mobility, and comorbidities.
Why It's Important
Good technique reduces complications, shortens recovery, preserves function, and frankly, spares patients pain and repeat admissions.
How to Improve Wound Care Skills
Assess fully: Measure precisely, stage accurately, evaluate exudate, edges, periwound skin, perfusion, and pressure risk.
Match dressing to need: Manage moisture, protect fragile skin, and choose antimicrobial options when indicated. Revisit choices as the wound evolves.
Protect against infection: Aseptic technique, glove changes, clean-to-dirty flow, and timely removal of devitalized tissue per policy.
Support from the inside: Screen for protein-calorie deficits, hydration, glycemic control, and anemia. Escalate nutrition consults early.
Team up: Pull in wound care specialists, PT/OT, dietitians, and vascular or endocrine colleagues when healing stalls.
Teach clearly: Home care routines, offloading, signs of trouble—simple instructions, written and verbal.
Small adjustments, big differences over weeks.
How to Display Wound Care Skills on Your Resume
3. IV Therapy
IV therapy delivers fluids, blood products, and medications directly into the venous system—peripheral or central—with precision and speed.
Why It's Important
It’s the backbone of acute care: rapid effect, accurate dosing, immediate titration, and reliable access for unstable patients.
How to Improve IV Therapy Skills
Choose the right device: Gauge, site, and catheter type should match therapy and vein quality. Consider ultrasound guidance for difficult access.
Prevent infection: Aseptic insertion, chlorhexidine prep, securement, clean dressings, and disciplined hub scrubs. Remove lines when no longer needed.
Reduce complications: Check for infiltration, extravasation, phlebitis. Elevate, warm, dilute, or slow infusions when appropriate.
Document and monitor: Site condition, patency, infusion rates, patient response—real-time and retrievable.
Educate patients: What to report (burning, swelling, leakage). How to protect the site during mobility.
Practice technique: Gentle insertion, vein stabilization, thoughtful tourniquet use. Repetition builds finesse.
Comfort improves as your success rate climbs.
How to Display IV Therapy Skills on Your Resume
4. Electronic Health Records (EHR)
EHRs are the digital nerve center of care: history, meds, notes, orders, imaging, trends—accessible and shareable across the team.
Why It's Important
They shrink delays, cut duplications, surface safety alerts, and make handoffs smoother. Done well, documentation and decision support blend into workflow instead of fighting it.
How to Improve Electronic Health Records (EHR) Skills
Train continuously: New features roll in often. Short refreshers prevent clunky workarounds from becoming habits.
Personalize your view: Smart phrases, favorites, order sets, and streamlined templates that match your unit’s rhythm.
Standardize entries: Consistent problem lists, reconciled meds, and time-stamped vitals make data trustworthy.
Protect privacy: Role-based access, locked screens, minimal necessary information, and strong passwords—nonnegotiable.
Speak up: Report pain points. User feedback often shapes configuration and fixes.
Better EHR habits save minutes per patient, which add up to hours per shift.
How to Display Electronic Health Records (EHR) Skills on Your Resume
5. Basic Life Support (BLS)
BLS covers immediate care for life-threatening emergencies: high-quality CPR, rapid defibrillation with an AED, and airway support across age groups.
Why It's Important
Seconds matter. Strong BLS buys time and brain, improving survival and neurologic outcomes before advanced care arrives.
How to Improve Basic Life Support (BLS) Skills
Follow current guidance: Review updates regularly and align with your organization’s protocols.
Drill often: Hands-on practice with feedback devices refines depth, rate, recoil, and minimal pauses.
Master AED flow: Fast pad placement, clear the patient, resume compressions without drift.
Work the team: Clear roles, closed-loop communication, and rapid rotations to prevent compressor fatigue.
Debrief: After events, identify strengths and gaps. Then fix the gaps.
Muscle memory wins when adrenaline spikes.
How to Display Basic Life Support (BLS) Skills on Your Resume
6. Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS)
ACLS layers advanced airway skills, cardiac pharmacology, and algorithm-driven responses onto the BLS foundation to manage cardiac arrest and acute coronary or stroke syndromes.
Why It's Important
Early recognition, organized response, and precise interventions tilt outcomes in the right direction when hearts misfire.
How to Improve Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) Skills
Keep algorithms fresh: Practice rhythms, indications, and doses until you can recall them under pressure.
Simulate: Scenario-based practice builds timing, teamwork, and situational awareness.
Know your meds: Onset, dosing, contraindications, and sequencing—no guesswork.
Refine airway skills: Bag-mask excellence first; escalate devices per policy and patient need.
Debrief and learn: Use data from code reviews to target the next practice cycle.
Calm, algorithmic thinking beats chaos—every time.
How to Display Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) Skills on Your Resume
7. Patient Education
Patient education translates complex care into doable steps. It equips patients and caregivers to understand conditions, treatments, and self-care—on their terms.
Why It's Important
Understanding drives adherence. Adherence drives outcomes. And informed patients feel less anxious and more in control.
How to Improve Patient Education Skills
Assess how they learn: Literacy, language, cultural factors, cognitive limits—adapt or lose your audience.
Talk plainly: Short sentences, no jargon, concrete examples. Use visuals when possible.
Teach-back: Ask patients to explain the plan in their words. Gaps jump out fast.
Layer resources: Verbal plus simple handouts; digital portals if available and appropriate.
Follow up: A check-in call or message can catch confusion before it becomes an ED visit.
Clarity beats volume. A few points well understood beat a binder left unread.
How to Display Patient Education Skills on Your Resume
8. Medication Administration
Medication administration is the disciplined process of giving the right medication to the right patient, in the right dose, route, and time, with the right documentation—and verifying the right reason and response.
Why It's Important
Errors here hurt quickly. Accuracy and vigilance prevent adverse events and keep treatments on track.
How to Improve Medication Administration Skills
Verify rights every time: Patient, medication, dose, route, time, documentation, indication, and response.
Use safety tech: Barcode medication administration and eMARs reduce wrong-patient and wrong-dose risk.
Know high-alert meds: Independent double checks, standardized concentrations, and smart pumps for narrow-therapeutic-index drugs.
Clarify orders: No assumptions. Resolve look-alike/sound-alike issues and ambiguous PRNs before giving.
Educate as you medicate: Expected effects, timing, and red flags. Patients become another safety net.
Control the environment: Minimize interruptions during preparation and administration.
Slow is smooth; smooth is safe.
How to Display Medication Administration Skills on Your Resume
9. Infection Control
Infection control weaves through everything: hand hygiene, PPE, cleaning and sterilization, isolation precautions, and thoughtful antimicrobial use.
Why It's Important
It protects patients and staff, curbs outbreaks, and preserves antibiotics for when they’re truly needed.
How to Improve Infection Control Skills
Hand hygiene without compromise: Before and after every patient contact, after glove removal, and whenever hands get contaminated.
Right PPE, right time: Standard and transmission-based precautions applied correctly—contact, droplet, airborne—with proper donning/doffing.
Device care bundles: Central lines, catheters, and ventilators need strict insertion and maintenance protocols.
Clean environment: Disinfect high-touch surfaces and equipment between patients; know contact times for agents used.
Safe injections: One needle, one syringe, one patient. Always.
Stewardship mindset: Validate indications, culture before antibiotics when possible, and reassess need daily.
Teach and model: Show patients and visitors how to protect themselves—hand hygiene, cough etiquette, source control.
Consistency beats complexity. Do the basics flawlessly.
How to Display Infection Control Skills on Your Resume
10. Telemetry Monitoring
Telemetry monitoring tracks cardiac rhythms and trends in real time so you can act before a blip becomes a crash.
Why It's Important
Continuous surveillance enables early detection of ischemia, arrhythmias, and deterioration—timely alarms, timely saves.
How to Improve Telemetry Monitoring Skills
Place electrodes properly: Clean skin, correct landmarks, secure leads—fewer artifacts, clearer signals.
Interpret with confidence: Rhythm recognition, rate calculations, intervals, and significance. Trend changes, not just snapshots.
Set sensible alarms: Tailor parameters to the patient and reduce alarm fatigue without sacrificing safety.
Communicate crisply: Use structured updates for significant changes. Document and escalate without delay.
Educate patients: Explain the purpose, keep leads intact, and encourage reporting of symptoms that monitors can’t feel.
Less noise, more signal. Better care.
How to Display Telemetry Monitoring Skills on Your Resume
11. Palliative Care
Palliative care eases suffering in serious illness—pain, symptoms, uncertainty—while honoring values and goals for patients and families.
Why It's Important
It raises quality of life, aligns treatments with what matters most, and supports caregivers through heavy moments.
How to Improve Palliative Care Skills
Deepen knowledge: Seek dedicated education such as ELNEC and unit-based mentorship.
Communicate with heart and structure: Frame goals-of-care talks, deliver serious news with clarity, and revisit decisions as conditions change.
Manage symptoms methodically: Pain, dyspnea, nausea, delirium—assess frequently and titrate thoughtfully.
Work as a team: Coordinate with physicians, social work, chaplaincy, and therapy services to cover medical and psychosocial needs.
Support families: Anticipatory guidance, respite options, and honest timelines ease the path.
Advocate access: Identify patients who would benefit early and refer promptly.
Compassion plus skill—both are required, neither is optional.
How to Display Palliative Care Skills on Your Resume
12. Epic Systems
Epic is a comprehensive EHR platform that lets nurses document, review, and coordinate care efficiently across the continuum.
Why It's Important
Proficiency speeds charting, reduces errors, improves communication, and surfaces the right data at the right time.
How to Improve Epic Systems Skills
Complete role-specific training: Take every module offered for your unit and scope of practice.
Leverage the Learning Home Dashboard: Use role-based tips, job aids, and updates to stay current.
Build tools that work for you: Smart phrases, order sets, preference lists, and custom views tuned to your routine.
Practice safely: Use test patients when available to explore features without risking real data.
Engage super users: Tap local experts for shortcuts, workflows, and troubleshooting.
Share feedback: Report issues and request optimizations; small tweaks can save time for the whole team.
When the chart flows, the shift flows.
How to Display Epic Systems Skills on Your Resume
