5 Skills to Highlight On Your Healthcare Resume
by guest author, Frankie Wallace
The healthcare industry can open you up to fascinating career opportunities. Your healthcare resume should be perfect. Career Resumes can help you create one that will stand out.
You also have the chance to make a tangible difference in people’s lives while earning an impressive salary. However, it’s important to recognize you won’t be the only candidate applying for a role. While the projected job growth in the health sector is high, competition for the most interesting and lucrative positions can be fierce.
As such, your healthcare resume can be your most powerful asset to stand out from the crowd. Having a strong combination of technical medical abilities and soft skills is essential for most healthcare roles. The basic personal attributes here are likely to include a sense of empathy toward patients and good stress management mechanisms. But your healthcare resume needs to show you have more than these basics.
Let’s take a look at 5 of the most important skills to showcase as part of an effective healthcare resume.
Your Agile Communication
Good communicative skills are a core component of any healthcare role. But what can really help your resume stand out is to demonstrate a certain amount of agility in your communication. The medical industry will see you interacting with people with various levels of health literacy. You must be able to listen to patients to establish their comprehension and often adjust your communications accordingly. Your efficacy here can significantly impact the quality of care and advice you provide as a medical professional.
When highlighting your communication agility, you can start by listing your competencies. If you’re learning a second language, this can be a valuable trait to showcase. Give details of additional courses on providing community health education you’ve attended. Expertise in diagnosis and treatment via telemedical services also presents you as an agile communicator and care provider.
Your Strong Ethics
A high standard of ethics is an essential aspect of your healthcare skillset. Employers know your actions every day as a medical professional can have a lasting impact on their reputation. Their confidence in you as a candidate is usually stronger if you can demonstrate that you hold yourself to solid principles. It’s one of the reasons highlighting your ethical standards should form part of both your resume and your cover letter.
You need to go beyond simply listing the fact that you have strong ethics. It’s a trait expected of all healthcare professionals. Rather, you should demonstrate your understanding of the practical application of ethics during your working practices. For instance, ethical doctors know when to say no to patient requests for unnecessary surgeries or inappropriate treatment plans. Being able to see beyond patient demands and offer morally better alternatives shows robust principles. Utilize real-life examples to better present the strength of your ethics.
Your Urgent Care Experience
Urgent care is one of the most important experiences to highlight on your resume. Even if you’re not applying for an urgent care or emergency room (ER) role, it communicates that you’ve gained some valuable abilities. You’re telegraphing your tendency to work well under significant pressure while still making effective life-changing decisions. It shows you have developed teamwork and task delegation competencies.
As such, you should find multiple opportunities to discuss your ER experiences in your resume. Don’t just stick to listing it on your work history or residency details. Describe experiences promoting your problem-solving skills under stressful conditions. If you’ve spent time volunteering for Doctors Without Borders or another frontline organization, be sure to highlight this. It shows you not only have experience in urgent care but also that your experiences involve a diverse range of environments and challenges. You’ll also find your unique and interesting emergency experiences to bolster your personal brand.
Your Intercultural Competence
Nurses in particular are interacting with increasingly diverse patients with varied linguistic and cultural needs. Hospitals and clinics can be more efficient assets to communities if their professionals are interculturally skilled. Your ability to empathize, connect, and collaborate with a diverse range of patients and professionals is invaluable in most healthcare roles. If your healthcare resume clearly shows you have multicultural skills and experiences, you’re likely to be prioritized over less agile candidates.
There are various ways you can highlight this attribute in your application. Make certain your hobbies and interests section includes details of your cultural activities. Talk about where you’ve traveled, your passion for connecting with communities, and any languages you’ve learned. It’s also important to describe experiences of addressing difficult cultural challenges. Provide examples of times you’ve navigated situations to provide solutions that were culturally sensitive and medically sound.
Your Commitment to Development
The healthcare industry is constantly changing. The public health needs of communities shift and constantly present new challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a prime example of this. Technology to improve administration, diagnoses, and treatments are developing all the time. As such, your resume has to show you commit to your continued personal and professional development.
Providing clear examples here shows recruiters you understand the need to be a relevant and innovative contributor to your field. If you’ve sought out residencies and certifications in additional specializations, don’t just list these. Write about your reasons for pursuing them and your plans for the future. Even education you’ve completed for your personal pleasure or out of curiosity is an important indicator of your willingness to grow.
Conclusion
The most rewarding roles in healthcare can also be the most competitive. As such, it’s important to establish what skills can make your resume stand out from the crowd. Your best approach is to focus on elements that provide value to employers beyond the basics. Agile communication abilities, urgent care experiences, and intercultural competencies are particularly attractive in the medical industry at the moment. By taking the time to effectively present these in your resume and application, you have a great chance to boost your medical career journey.
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About the author
Frankie Wallace is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys writing about career guidance and education but occasionally goes back to her roots with socially active news journalism. Frankie spends her free time cultivating her zero-waste garden or hiking in the mountains of the PNW with her loved ones.
