ROCK YOUR RESUME – HOW TO SHOWCASE YOUR SKILLS AND … · economics, strategic planning and...

ROCK YOUR RESUME – HOW TO SHOWCASE YOUR SKILLS AND BOOST YOUR VALUE

www.americansentinel.edu

2 | Transforming Healthcare Through EducationTM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Ready To Rock Your Resume? 3

Laying The Groundwork 4

Master The Master Resume 7

Speak Their Language 13

Conclusion 16

About American Sentinel University 18


3Transforming Healthcare Through EducationTM |

READY TO ROCK YOUR RESUME?

If it’s been a while since you updated this key job-search document, you’ll probably find that you have broader experiences, expanded expertise, and additional strengths that you’ll want to incorporate into your new-and-improved resume. And naturally you’ll want to expand your education information to include your American Sentinel University studies!

As you work through the following guide, keep in mind the purpose of your resume. It’s a personal marketing piece; meant to convince potential employers that you are the perfect combination of skills, personal characteristics, expertise, and education for their job and organization.

What positive contributions are you likely to make? Even though, as they say in the finance field, “past performance is not a predictor of future results,” when it comes to hiring decisions, resumes still provide the best indication of what your contributions might be and how you might make them.

So channel your inner marketing expert, start pulling together your work information, get ready to do some self-reflection, and let’s get started!



Before you can start crafting your best-ever resume, you need to do a bit of exploration to lay the groundwork for the statements that will best promote you to potential employers.

What type of work would you like to do?The first type of exploration you need to do involves researching or reflecting on what type of work you want to do. Your American Sentinel degree will open up many career paths for you, and it will be up to you to determine which one you want to pursue – or pursue first.

For example, a degree in Nursing Education might open up opportunities to work in a university nursing degree program, in patient education, in an allied health field, or staff development or education at a hospital. As Dr. Karen Whitham, Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Nursing Programs, points out, “essentially all of nursing is in one way or another involved in patient education.”

A degree in Nursing Informatics might lead to jobs in electronic medical records (EMR); managing records as well as training staff in their effective use; clinical and administrative records; data mining and analysis; healthcare informatics; or with one of the major vendors, such as Epic, McKesson, or Cerner.

On the other hand, a degree in Organizational Leadership and Management could lead to careers not only in nursing management but also in finance or economics, strategic planning and management, project management, clinic or hospital department management, and change management/leadership as a part of any of these other roles.

That degree in Case Management? The need for knowledgeable professionals able to coordinate interdisciplinary care for complex medical issues exists in a multitude of settings. Roles and responsibilities might include team coordinator, quality improvement, patient care quality specialist, and other titles including some aspect of patient follow-up.

And graduates with degrees in Infection Prevention and Control can use that strong process focus in a wide range of roles that involve identification, collection and interpretation of surveillance (reports), coordination of education, training, monitoring, and key roles in both public and institutional infection prevention initiatives.

And for those with a BSN, the opportunities are nearly as diverse as the healthcare industry itself.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK



Where and how would you like to work?This is about your personal work preferences – in what types of environments are you likely to thrive? For example, some potential work settings include:

• Hospitals

• Nursing and residential care facilities

• Physician offices

• Home healthcare services

• Ambulatory healthcare services

• Alternative settings: cruise ships, prisons, health spas, schools (K-12 and college), visiting nurses and other temporary or contract placement agencies

Each one of these work environments has characteristics that would strongly appeal to some individuals and be off-putting to others. Your challenge is to think through what might be best for you, given your personality and life circumstances.

Identifying Your Unique StrengthsBefore you can create your resume you have to understand what strengths you have that make you uniquely valuable to a potential employer – in business speak, this is known as your “value proposition.” Your goal is to understand your strengths well enough to be able to match them up to key job requirements in your resume language.

The difference between strengths and skills is that your skills are learned areas of expertise such as case management, whereas strengths are inherent characteristics. Strengths such as adaptability or patience or curiosity, when combined with your learned expertise, make you uniquely suited to specific types of work. For example, strengths that might help a case manager be particularly effective might be a natural attention to detail, an innate comfort with multitasking, an enjoyment of working with many different types of people, and patience.

How do you identify your unique strengths if you’re not already familiar with them? One of the easiest ways is to check out the work done by the Gallup organization and popularized in the book StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (Gallup Press, 2007). The basic premise is that each of us have certain



inherent strengths that, if allowed to flourish in the right work setting, enable us to perform at our highest and most enjoyable level.

Other ways to learn more about your strengths include the VIA Character Strengths Test. The VIA strengths identify your internal strengths, whereas the StrengthsFinder assessment focuses on your external (or people-facing) strengths. Another resource that provides a take on identifying, understanding, and describing your key strengths is Sally Hogshead’s How the World Sees You (HarperBusiness, 2014).

As noted, your inherent strengths are different than your areas of expertise, or what you know and all the exciting things you can do with what you know. For example, among StrengthsFinder’s 34 key themes or strengths are Activator, Connectedness, Developer, Futuristic, Ideation, Learner, and Significance. The VIA character strengths include Bravery, Curiosity, Humor, Perseverance, and Social Intelligence, among others (the descriptions for both do a great job of clarifying how these sometimes odd-sounding terms translate into work-speak).

The reason understanding your key strengths is important to your resume is that you must weave the value of those strengths throughout your summary of qualifications, your work history description, and the cover letter that accompanies your resume.



By now you’ve probably checked out a wide variety of job postings to get a sense of what jobs might be a good fit for your skill set, you’ve thought about which ones best align with your preference for work environment, and you’re starting to develop a good sense of your unique strengths and attributes (your value proposition).

Time to create your resume. And by that we mean your dynamic sales piece. Because the goal of your resume isn’t simply to recount your professional history; instead, its purpose is to sell you as the best solution to a potential employer’s needs.

As noted earlier, one of the great things about the nursing profession is that there are so many ways to use your skills for a variety of employers. That means you’ll need to re-work your resume to align with the specific needs of jobs you’re applying for on a regular basis. The good news is that once you’ve created a master resume, the tailoring process should be pretty quick and painless.

What’s a master resume? It’s essentially a resume that includes all of your relevant information, stated in a compelling, concise manner, using the best practices of resume-creation. Your goal is to create a document that can quickly and easily be tailored to specific job opportunities. For example, your master resume may include all of the jobs, activities, and achievements you’ve had over the past 15 years, while your tailored resume for a management job will be edited down a bit to focus on just those achievements that specifically showcase your management expertise and accomplishments.

What elements will your master resume include? First, the basics, which include:

• Contact information

• Key competencies or strengths statement

• Work experience

• Education

• Professional affiliations

Let’s look at each one of these elements in a bit more detail.

MASTER THE MASTER RESUME



Contact information: This should be your name, address, preferred phone number, email address, and website and LinkedIn profile URLs if you have them. Although your formatting choices might be somewhat different, you will have something like this:

Jane Smith

100 Main Street, Anytown, Ohio 43001

440-555-5555; [youremailaccount].com

www.[yourwebsitename].com; www.linkedin.com/in/[yourLinkedInURL]

Key competencies or strengths statement: Identify here the key strengths and skills that enable you to provide value to a potential explorer. Remember that previous information about identifying your strengths? This is where you use that information to distinguish what makes you a terrific job candidate. This section may also be called “Career Achievements,” “Career Highlights,” “Expertise Highlights,” “Profile,” “Core Competencies” or “Qualifications Summary,” among other titles. Use whatever heading feels best for you, although to some degree your choice may be determined by how many achievements you can point to. If you are just starting your career, you may want to go with competencies or strengths until you have more achievements to showcase.

Your summary or strengths statement can be formatted in a number of ways – for example, as a concise paragraph, boxed text, or a double column of bullet points (double column to save space). Because many organizations use electronic scanners to review resumes and screen out less-than-desirable applicants it’s important to focus on keywords mentioned in the specific job description.

For example, a job description mentions the importance of being adaptable, collaborative, and innovative, and also stated that teaching experience would be helpful. Assuming these were, in fact, strengths and areas of expertise for you, your summary statement might look something like one of the following :



Qualifications Summary

• Adaptable, collaborative RN with 10 years of experience and increasing responsibility at regional VA hospital

• Focused on innovative solutions to patient-care delivery challenges as demonstrated by three innovation awards

• Recognized for planning and teaching diverse, outstanding patient education programs

Or

Career Achievements

Adaptable, collaborative RN whose passion and commitment to excellence in nursing has resulted in 10 years of increasing responsibility at a regional VA hospital. Thrives on creating innovative solutions to patient-care delivery challenges, as demonstrated by receiving three awards for innovation. Empathetic and effective teacher recognized for planning and providing diverse, outstanding patient education programs.

Or

Key Strengths

Adaptable, collaborative RN whose passion and commitment to excellence in nursing has resulted in 10 years of increasing responsibility at regional VA hospital. Thrive on creating innovative solutions to patient-care delivery challenges (three awards for innovation). Empathetic and effective teacher recognized for planning and providing diverse, outstanding patient education programs.

Your work experience: This may include paid employment, full-time or part-time positions, internships, and volunteer work if relevant to the skills required in a job listing. A functional resume will list entries by type of responsibility, whereas a chronological resume will list most recent work first, and then follow with additional positions in reverse chronological order. With either approach (and there’s not an agreement about which is preferred by hiring managers), your goal is to identify not so much a list of responsibilities as an overview of accomplishments – what value did you add to the organization through your efforts? If you can document any improvements with actual numbers, so much the better.



A functional work history for an employed nurse administrator might follow a format like this:

Work ExperienceAdministration

• Plan and implement new intake processes; processes implemented to date have resulted in 95% reduction in duplicate records, 60% increase in patient case records resolved, and 65% increase in patient satisfaction scores over five-year period

• Manage new-hire integration; created a new-hire on-boarding program resulting in increased productivity, faster incorporation of best-practice knowledge, and 55% increase in job satisfaction among new hires

Teaching

• Updated and expanded internal training program; designed and presented four annual training sessions for nursing staff on best practices in patient care, emerging trends in evidence-based medicine, generational differences among acute-care patients, and collaborative communication approaches in the workplace, with participant evaluations of 4.5 or higher for each (1-5 scale)

After identifying your work history by function, you’d then follow up with a chronological listing of employment or work engagements (which might include, for example, volunteer projects), providing only dates and employment names. This brief listing might look like this:

Jan 2010-present Nurse Administrator, Patient Support, VA Medical Center, Denver, CO

Jul 2006-Dec 2010 Assistant Nurse Administrator, St. Luke’s Hospital, Thousand Oaks, CA

Jan 1998-Jun 2006 RN, Women’s Care Unit, Good Samaritan Hospital, Lincoln, NE



Alternatively, a chronological work history entry for a nurse administrator might look like this:

Work Experience

Jan 2010-present Nurse Administrator, Patient Support, Veteran Affairs Medical Center, Denver, CO

• Plan and implement new intake processes; processes implemented to date have resulted in 95% reduction in duplicate records, 60% increase in patient case records resolved, and 65% increase in patient satisfaction scores over five-year period

• Manage new-hire integration; created a new-hire on-boarding program resulting in increased productivity, faster incorporation of best-practice knowledge, and 55% increase in job satisfaction among new hires

How far back should you go when detailing your work history? Generally speaking, employers only expect to see about 10-15 years of your prior work history or experience.

Whether you choose a functional or chronological work-history approach, your goals will be to:

• Match your descriptions with keywords in the job description where possible

• Focus on achievements and value added rather than solely on job tasks or responsibilities when you can

• Showcase your highest-level skills and expertise (don’t waste precious resume space, ex: noting that you filed patient records or have good word-processing skills unless this is an important part of the job for which you’re applying)

Education: Your education and credentials are important, so you’ll want to be sure to include all relevant information here, including your degrees, certifications, continuing education courses completed, and licensures. Don’t include your GPA unless you’re fresh out of school, you have little work experience, and it’s amazing (3.75 or better) or if the job posting specifically asks for it. On the other hand, if you’ve taken some courses that are directly relevant to the job and indicate how current your knowledge is, you might want to list those courses under your education section.



Professional affiliations: Membership in professional groups (for example, American Association of Critical Care Nurses or National Association of Directors of Nursing Administration in Long Term Care) can provide a key indicator for potential employers about your level of professional engagement and commitment. You want to make sure that you list any relevant associations to which you belong – and if you don’t belong to any professional organizations in your area of interest or expertise, now might be a great time to join at least one.

Additional Resume ElementsDepending on the breadth and depth of your work history and/or expertise, there are a number of additional elements you may want to add to your resume. These might include:

• Awards and honors

• Community involvement (pro bono or volunteer commitments)

• Professional activities

• Publications

• Presentations

• Military service

• Other differentiators, such as non-nursing but relevant additional education, languages spoken, etc.

Once you’ve created your master resume, you’ve completed the hardest part of the resume process. As you proceed with your job search, you will need to customize some of the language to reflect the requirements of the specific jobs for which you’re applying. In order to familiarize yourself with that process, it’s smart to practice this in advance with a number of job descriptions so you can get the hang of it before you’re applying for any of your dream jobs.



When discussing careers and jobs, you’ll often hear people speak of transferable skills, that is, those skills that you might have developed in one work environment but that can easily be just as effective in a new one. An example of a transferable skill would be working successfully in a retail situation and then applying those skills and strengths to other customer service settings.

Learning their language: The key, however, when selling the value of your transferable skills to a potential employer is to translate those skills into language that resonates with relevant hiring managers. To do so, you need to familiarize yourself with both the organization and the language of the job for which you’re applying.

What does the job posting call the type of work you’ve done? Are you finding terms like case management, pediatric, acute care, chronic care, patient scheduling, billing, reimbursement, informatics, process improvement, quality assurance, patient education, patient/physician relations, rehabilitation, primary care, urgent care? Make sure you use the same language when you tailor your master resume.

Next, how does the organization describe its constituency or target market? That’s what you want to call them, too, whether that’s customers, patients, clients, or some other term. This is especially important if you’re trying to transition from one type of work setting – for example, public health – to another very different environment, such as a for-profit clinic.

The easiest way to learn more about the job is to simply read the job description and requirements very carefully, with an eye on identifying specific words used. When it comes to understanding more about the organization, look to their website, their Facebook page and/or Twitter feed if they have one; do an online search for any press releases or other information being written about the group. Your goal is to be able to tailor your resume language – the terms and phrases you use – to their universe, while also providing yourself the background information you need for a killer interview.

Channel your inner sales geek: Also, when it comes to the language you use in your resume, remember that your job isn’t to tell someone about your skills; rather it’s to sell them on your ability to add value to their organization. You want them to see you as the solution to whatever challenge they’re facing. So take every opportunity you can to showcase, highlight, promote, or otherwise sell your strengths and expertise.

SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE



Achieved

Adapted

Addressed

Aided

Allocated

Analyzed

Arranged

Assessed

Assisted

Authored

Began

Cataloged

Categorized

Charted

Coached

Collaborated

Compiled

Completed

Conceptualized

Conducted

Coordinated

Counseled

Customized

Decreased

Defined

Designed

Determined

Developed

Directed

Engineered

Enhanced

Established

Evaluated

Exceeded

Executed

Expanded

Facilitated

Formulated

Generated

Identified

Improved

Incorporated

Increased

Initiated

Installed

Instructed

Integrated

Introduced

Led

Managed

Negotiated

Organized

Originated

Oversaw

Performed

Planned

Prepared

Processed

Programmed

Reorganized

Researched

Resolved

Revised

Revitalized

Set goals for

Set up

Shaped

Simplified

Solved

Spearheaded

Standardized

Strengthened

Supervised

Taught

Updated

Volunteered

Always use action verbs. Not sure which ones to choose? Depending on what type of work history you have and the jobs for which you’re applying, your list might include some selection of the following:



In their excellent Expert Resumes for Health Care Careers, 2d ed. (JistWorks, 2010), authors Wendy S. Enelow and Louise M. Kursmark provide a great example of the difference between “telling and selling”:

Tell it strategy: Supervised staffing and scheduling for all nursing aids and assistants in the hospital.

Sell it strategy: Full responsibility for managing a 245-person staff of nursing aides and assistants at a 650-bed acute care hospital. Coordinated new-staff orientation, staff scheduling, ongoing training and development program, and the annual recertification process. Maintained staffing levels at near 100%, with less than 5% turnover.

As you can see, the second description is much likelier to catch the eye of a hiring manager looking for someone who can hit the ground running and immediately start contributing.



Whether you’re submitting it online or handing one to a hiring manager in person, a well-done resume is one of your most powerful marketing tools. It can and should make a compelling statement on not only your strengths and expertise, but also more importantly how you’ve used them to create value for each organization. Show the benefits to be gained by hiring you.

Do you feel like you’re lacking in the achievements area? Now’s a great time to start volunteering for new opportunities at your current job and start building up your portfolio of accomplishments!

10 Tips for Rocking Your Resume1. Use a very clean page layout so electronic scanners can easily

recognize key information sections. Also, a generous amount of white space on the page makes your text easier to read for both electronic scanners and hiring managers.

2. Unless it’s an academic CV, go for a resume length of no more than two pages. (If two pages, make sure your name is on both pages.)

3. Use a standard, rather than customized or “jazzy,” font so scanners can easily recognize your words.

4. Always tailor your resume to the specifics of the job for which you’re applying.

5. If a previous employer you’re listing isn’t well-known or it’s not obvious from their name what type of organization they are, note in parentheses what type of work they do.

6. Always lead with a Summary or Strengths statement; Objectives Statements are no longer used.

7. No need to include the phrase “References Available Upon Request” – everyone takes this for granted, and not including this will give you more space for more valuable “sales” information.

CONCLUSION



8. Focus on key information rather than on all your information. Although you want to provide a complete chronology of your work history; where possible you’ll want to shape each job’s description so it relates to the job you seek, which means leaving out unimportant job details.

9. If possible, try to create a narrative thread, or story, with your resume, one that shows increasing responsibility and initiative as you’ve advanced in your career.

10. If you’re still not 100% confident that your resume is the dynamite sales piece you need it to be, consider hiring a resume-writing expert to do a quick polish for you. Your goal is to make sure that your “marketing collateral,” that is, your resume, provides just the competitive edge you need to land that job.

Notes

Enelow, Wendy S. and Louise M. Kursmark, Expert ResumesTM for Health Care Careers, 2d ed. JistWorks, 2010, p. 5.



American Sentinel University delivers accredited online degree programs in nursing (BSN, MSN, and DNP) and healthcare management (MBA Healthcare, M.S. Information Systems Management, and M.S. Business Intelligence and Analytics). Its affordable, flexible bachelor’s and master’s nursing degree programs are accredited by the Commission for the Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE), of One Dupont Circle, NW Suite 530, Washington, D.C., 20036. The DNP program is accredited by the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) of 3343 Peachtree Road NE, Suite 850, Atlanta, Ga., 30326. The University is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, DEAC, 1101 17th Street NW, Suite 808, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 234-5100, www.deac.org.

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American Sentinel University

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ROCK YOUR RESUME – HOW TO SHOWCASE YOUR SKILLS AND … · economics, strategic planning and...

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