When you’re looking for a job as senior care provider or home care worker, having a resumé that highlights your strengths and 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 resumé needs to showcase how successfully you’ve performed similar tasks in the past and your potential to take these skills further—so it should always be adapted to the job description. Here are a few top tips for writing a resumé 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 resumé. 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 resumés 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.
Aim for a one- or two-sentence description that sums up who you are, where you are 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 seniors.” 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 long-term 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 support seniors or disabled people with their daily functions, drive them to medical appointments as needed, prepare meals for them, act as a companion, and communicate concerns about their health to a supervisor.
You can also highlight some of your positive qualities, but don’t go overboard. Relevant personal traits include reliability, professionalism, and a focus on customer service, while useful transferable skills include organization and time management.
If you’re drawing a blank on what skills you should include on your resumé, 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 friends in the sector and ask them what they’ve included on their resumés.
- Check out senior 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 resumé is an excellent place to include any long-term 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 perfectly reasonable to include family caring experience in the Experience section of your resumé, even if you weren’t paid to care for a relative. If you did this long-term or took time off work to provide care, it should definitely be included as a job. It is important to mention on your resumé, however, that this experience involved a relative.
List all your certificates
Are you certified in CPR and first aid? Do you have a current driving licence? Are you trained as a Home Support Worker (HSW), Personal Support Worker (PSW), or Continuing Care Assistant (CCA)? Include all of these details in a Certification section on your resumé, as some of these certifications may be necessary to meet the requirements of a role.
Round it out with final details
It’s useful for senior care providers to have a high school diploma and community college or vocational school training. List all your academic qualifications in an Education section on your resumé. If you don’t have any, don’t include this section.
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 resumé will help show off your professionalism during your job search—and may land you your dream role.