What Are Healthcare Skills?
When we speak of healthcare skills, what we are referring to are the skills needed to provide medical and health-related services to patients.
The reality of healthcare is that it involves many different professional roles.
For instance, healthcare institutions need administrators as much as they need caretakers!
Healthcare involves a mixture of both interpersonal and technical skills.
As such, there is a wide range of different skills that may be useful to include on a resume.
Why Should I Include Healthcare Skills on My Resume?
Whenever you are writing a resume with a specific industry in mind, including relevant skills to that industry is key.
By including your healthcare skills on your resume, you can show employers your specific qualifications for the job.
Plus, if the job description contains skills the employer desires, this allows you to showcase your skills that have been requested by the employer.
The key to writing a strong healthcare resume is to tailor the document to the job.
If you need more help learning to tailor your resume, read our guide on how to Tailor Your Resume to Any Job in 4 Easy Steps.
What Are the Best Healthcare Skills I Should Add to My Resume?
As mentioned, the key to adding healthcare skills to your resume is to include both interpersonal and technical skills.
Here is a quick definition of each to guide you when selecting your skills:
- Hard (Technical) Skills: Hard skills deal with your technical abilities. These skills are often learnable and are developed through training and education primarily.
- Soft (Interpersonal) Skills: Soft skills have to do with your emotional intelligence. They affect your social interactions, emotional state, and workplace behavior.
In healthcare, employers will likely be looking for very specific hard skills on resumes.
This means you should place a greater emphasis on these.
However, including soft skills is still important.
Doing so shows employers that you know the value of human interaction and strive to be a good communicator on top of being technically skilled.
In this section, we will provide you with 10 of the top hard skills healthcare employers search for.
Plus, we will cover 5 soft skills that are essential for healthcare workers!
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10 Key Hard Skills for Healthcare Resumes
- Pharmacy: Many skills fall into the category of pharmacy. Common examples include pharmaceutical sales and pharmacy technicians. Pharmacy-related skills are widely sought out throughout the healthcare industry.
- Data Entry: Every healthcare institution has its own health information system. Knowledge of how to collect and input data, maintain records, and run reports are crucial data entry skills for healthcare workers.
- Medical Record Management: Managing medical records is a necessary practice in healthcare. This skill can include corresponding with patients and sending medical record copies to authorized parties.
- Outbound + Inbound Calling: Understanding how to work within a call center has become an important part of healthcare. Many essential tasks are handled through call centers, including appointment setting and exchanging patient information.
- HIPAA Knowledge: HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability Act of 1996. This federal law is in place to protect the information of patients and affects almost all daily tasks of healthcare professionals.
- CPR + First Aid: If you are a medical practitioner, CPR and First Aid will be foundational requirements for you. However, if you are a healthcare administrator or other professional on the business side, knowing these skills can still be beneficial – especially in emergencies.
- Business Administration: There is a ton of important work that goes on in the business side of healthcare. Understanding the basics of business administration and how to work with the relevant technologies is key.
- Microsoft Outlook: Outlook is an email and calendar scheduling program that is highly popular within healthcare. Because use of the program is so widespread, it can be helpful to include your proficiency in Outlook on your resume.
- Licenses: There are many different licenses you can earn in healthcare. Common ones include nurse and RN licenses. If you have earned licenses, these will be critical to include within your technical skills. If you have many certifications and licenses, you may consider creating a separate section altogether for these types of qualifications.
- Urgent Care: Knowing how to treat a patient in urgent situations or emergencies is crucial for healthcare professionals. This can include dressing wounds and administering fast-acting medicines.
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5 Key Soft Skills for Healthcare Resumes
- Positivity: When it comes to dealing with other people’s health, the attitude you meet them with is majorly important. The ability to maintain a positive outlook in both yourself and others is crucially important when working in healthcare.
- Attention to Detail: Patients need to trust your ability to be thorough. From record-keeping to diagnosing symptoms, healthcare involves a lot of details. Having good attention to detail is pertinent for healthcare professionals.
- Stress Management: There’s no denying that the healthcare industry can be anxiety-inducing. As a healthcare professional, your ability to stay level-headed and manage your stress well is critically important.
- Active Listening: Sharing personal health information can make patients feel vulnerable. Practicing active listening is a key component to helping patients feel both safe and heard.
- Emotional Support: Healthcare services can be very personal. For some patients, it can be difficult to bear the weight of diagnoses, payments, or other medical issues. As a healthcare worker, it becomes your responsibility to provide patients with the proper emotional support and resources.
If you need some extra help brainstorming skills to include on your resume, check out our list of 100+ Key Skills for a Resume in 2021 (with Examples for Any Job).
How Do I List My Healthcare Skills on a Resume?
There are two main formatting options for listing your healthcare skills on a resume:
- Including management skills in your work experience section
- Creating a separate section for management skills
Generally speaking, you should include both a work experience and a skills section on your resume and divide your skills between them.
Soft skills are typically better suited in the work experience section, as this gives you more room to explain them and provide context.
By contrast, hard skills don’t always need much extra explanation.
This makes them more suitable for a super concise and separate skills section.
1) Including Healthcare Skills in Your Work Experience Section
Incorrect:
Work ExperiencePatient Care Technician,
Family Hospital
February 2016 – March 2021
• Earned CPR and First Aid certification
• Trained in Microsoft Outlook
• Provided urgent care to patients
Why It’s Wrong: Rather than focusing on the responsibilities of the Primary Care Technician role, the applicant focuses too heavily on certifications and technical skills.
In the work experience section, the skills you add should always be used to emphasize and give greater context to your experience.
Correct:
Work ExperiencePatient Care Technician,
Family Hospital
February 2016 – March 2021
• Implemented a new patient care process that increased patient satisfaction by 10 percent
• Managed email correspondence with patients through Microsoft Outlook
• Provided daily urgent care to walk-in patients
In this corrected example, certifications have been removed to include in a separate section.
The new descriptions are much more specific and quantifiable.
They are also much more relevant to the job being described.
Hint: Are you trying to write a resume with little to no work experience?
Check out our guide on How to Write a Resume with No Work Experience in 2021 (with Examples).
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2) Creating a Separate Healthcare Skills Section
Incorrect:
Healthcare Skills
• Empathetic
• Positive
• Data Entry
Why It’s Wrong: In this example, the skills section focuses too much on hard skills and there is not enough context given around the skills.
Though you want to keep your skills section as short as possible, providing a few extra words that clarify your skills is key.
Additionally, skills like “empathy” can encompass many other skills – being more specific can be helpful.
Correct:
Healthcare Skills
• Payment History Data Entry
• Management of Medical Records
• Active Listening to Patient Concerns
In this corrected example, the focus has been shifted towards the applicant’s technical skills.
Plus, the extra words provide more specific context around how the applicant uses these skills.
What Are Some Things I Can Do to Improve My Healthcare Skills
As a healthcare professional, you always want to work to improve your skills.
This is especially true if you do not have many relevant skills to include on a resume!
Here are 3 ways to improve your healthcare skills:
- Certifications and Training: The best way to gain new technical skills is to seek out certification and training programs. Not only will you learn a new skill, but you will earn a certification that provides you with an even greater qualification for your resume!
- Develop an Empathetic Attitude: Healthcare professionals need to develop a high level of empathy to satisfy patients. Learning about empathy in the workplace and how to apply empathetic skills will greatly help you land more jobs in the industry.
- Seek Feedback: Patients and coworkers are often the best benchmarks of how well you apply your skills. Seeking regular feedback is one of the best ways to identify your strengths and uncover areas in need of improvement.
Final Takeaways
The healthcare industry is made up of many essential workers striving to make the world a healthier place.
When applying to this industry, including your specific healthcare skills is key.
Here are our top 5 takeaways for including healthcare skills on a resume:
- You should always include both technical and interpersonal skills on your resume. Employers want to know about both your abilities and your emotional intelligence.
- When writing your skills on your resume, it is useful to include them in both a work experience section a dedicated skills sections.
- Soft (interpersonal) skills are better suited in the work experience section where they can be given more context. Hard (technical) skills need less explanation and can be listed more plainly in a skills section.
- Your attitude matters in healthcare. Including skills that showcase your emotional intelligence is majorly important as a result.
- Seek certifications, training, and feedback to improve your healthcare skills is key.
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