When you’re looking for a job as an aged care provider or home care worker, having a CV that highlights your strengths and your certifications can set you apart from the competition. The formal record of your experience should include your skills, your relevant certificates, and any training you’ve had. Your CV should always be adapted to the job description, as it’s meant to showcase how successfully you’ve performed similar tasks in the past, and your potential to take these skills further.
Here are a few top tips for writing a CV designed to start or continue a rewarding career as a care provider.
Start with the basics
First things first: remember to list your name and contact information at the top of your resume. It may sound obvious, but your address, email, and telephone number are all too easy to forget!
Directly beneath your personal information, include a Professional Summary or Personal Description, which is a special section that highlights your specific relevant qualities. This section is useful, as people who look at CVs often only glance at each one for a few seconds to decide whether or not a candidate will be a good fit for the position. You’ll be more likely to land a job interview with a strong summary of your skills at the top.
Opt for a one- or two-sentence description that sums up who you are, where you’re at in your career, and what you want to communicate to a hiring manager. Consider something like: “Enthusiastic personal care provider with CPR training and eight years’ experience working with the elderly”. If you have any special skills—if you’re fluent in another language or you have first-aid certificates—be sure to include them here as well.
Name your specific skills and experience
In your Experience section, list skills that are relevant to the specific role of aged care provider or home care worker, so that hiring families or managers will know that you have the background to do the job well.
Mention what you’ve done in each position that you’ve held and give examples. Perhaps you help elderly or frail people to go about their daily functions, drive them to medical appointments as needed, help them take medication, prepare meals for them, act as a companion, help them exercise, assist them with bathing/grooming, and communicate concerns about their health to a supervisor.
You can also highlight some of your positive qualities, but don’t go overboard. It’s more useful to say that you’re strong enough to assist someone in and out of a wheelchair than that you’re cheerful. Relevant personal traits include reliability, professionalism, and a focus on customer service, while useful transferable skills include organisation and time management.
If you’re drawing a blank on what skills you should include in your CV, an easy way to jog your memory is by seeing what other prospective care providers are including on theirs. You can do this a few ways:
- Talk to any friends in the sector and ask them what they’ve included on their CVs.
- Check out aged care provider profiles online.
- Read through job postings on sites like Care.com and see what skills employers are looking for.
Include relevant personal experience
A care provider CV is an excellent place to put any aged care experience that you may have had, even if you gained that experience by caring for an ailing relative. Specify all the tasks you performed, from taking the individual where they needed to go to attending to their personal care needs. It’s not necessary to mention they were a relative.
It’s perfectly reasonable to include experience caring for a family member in the Experience section of your CV, even if you weren’t paid to care for the relative. If you did this long-term or took time off work to provide care, it should definitely be included as a job.
List all your certificates
Are you certified in CPR and first aid? Do you have a current driver’s licence? Do you have vocational caregiver certification or training as a Nursing/Healthcare Assistant? Include all of these details in a Certificates section of your CV. Committed candidates who demonstrate proven skills in relevant practical areas such as these are considered credible and competitive for the role.
Round it out with final details
It’s useful for aged care providers to have secondary school qualifications such as VCE or HSC. List all your academic qualifications in an Education section on your CV. If you don’t have any, don’t include this.
If you’ve only been working in the care sector for a few years, it’s OK to include experience in other sectors to show that you’ve been steadily employed over a longer period of time. Some employers are keen to build up a picture of your entire professional history, even if it isn’t directly relevant to your role, so they know you’re a reliable choice.
At the end of the day, presenting a polished CV will help show off your professionalism during your job search—and may land you your dream role.
