Newly qualified nurses and midwives – use your placement experience!

If you’re a newly qualified nurse or midwife, or you’re in your third year of studying and about to start applying for jobs, this blog post is for you. As you will no doubt have noticed, the public sector is going through a recruitment low point, so the private and not-for-profit sectors are more popular as a jumping off point into your career than they were prior to this current economic trauma.

You need to make the most of your placement experience on your CV and in your personal statement in order to compete for the job vacancies out there.

Even if a job vacancy doesn’t specify that they can accept newly qualified staff, it’s still worth applying for and your placement experience is the key to backing up your application.

Your CV should always be adapted for every job application you make – tailor it to work for you, and if that means putting your most recent placement experience at the very top, then do it! There are no rules with the order of your CV (except that your name and contact details needs to be at the very top!) so make it work for you!If you have recently completed a placement in a similar environment to the job you’re applying for, that’s perfect!

Make sure on your CV and in your personal statement you go into detail about the learning outcomes you achieved, how well you adapted to the working environment and the interpersonal skills you developed, such as communication and team working.

Experience as a student is highly valuable, and can boost the quality of your application from simply being an NQ with no specific departmental experience to being an NQ with transferable skills from that very department into your new role.Give yourself credit for all the work you’ve done and the skills you’ve achieved on your course.

Even if it might seem obvious to you that this particular skill was included in your course material, if you learned it and then put it into practice on a placement – draw attention to it on your CV.