CNA Resume Example: A Full Sample, Plus the Certification Block That Gets You Screened In

The certification block, and why it goes near the top

Federal law sets the floor here. Under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 and 42 CFR 483.152, a state-approved nurse aide training and competency evaluation program must consist of "no less than 75 clock hours of training" and include "at least 16 hours of supervised practical training." The same body of regulation requires every state to maintain a registry of nurse aides who have passed that evaluation. Thirty states and the District of Columbia require more than the federal minimum — some as many as 180 hours. What that means practically: your certification is not a nice-to-have credential you mention at the end. It is the thing that makes you legally employable in a certified facility, and it is verifiable in a public registry that the person reading your resume can search while they are reading it. So give them what they need to do that, in one block, immediately under your contact details: CERTIFICATIONS Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) — Ohio Nurse Aide Registry #1234567, active through Aug 2027 BLS / CPR — American Heart Association, expires Mar 2027 Four things make this work. The credential name spelled out with the acronym, so both "Certified Nursing Assistant" and "CNA" appear as searchable text. The state, because registries do not cross state lines and a recruiter in Ohio needs to know you are on Ohio's. The registry number, which signals you know how this works and lets them verify without emailing you. And the expiration date, which is the question they would otherwise have to ask. If your certification has lapsed or is pending, say so plainly — "CNA certification, Ohio, renewal in progress, exam scheduled Sept 2026." A pending renewal stated openly is a scheduling question. A missing date discovered later is a credibility problem.

CNA resume example: experienced

This is a complete resume for a CNA with several years in long-term care. Copy the structure and replace the specifics. MARIA DELGADO Columbus, OH | (614) 555-0142 | m.delgado@email.com CERTIFICATIONS Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) — Ohio Nurse Aide Registry #1234567, active through Aug 2027 BLS / CPR — American Heart Association, expires Mar 2027 Dementia Care Certified — Alzheimer's Association essentiALZ, 2025 PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY CNA with 6 years in skilled nursing and memory care, currently carrying 12–14 residents per shift. Strong record on fall prevention and restorative programs; trained 9 new aides through facility orientation. WORK EXPERIENCE Certified Nursing Assistant Riverbend Skilled Nursing & Rehabilitation — Columbus, OH Mar 2022 – Present • Provide ADL care for 12–14 residents per shift on a 40-bed memory care unit, including bathing, dressing, toileting, and transfers. • Record and chart vital signs, intake and output, and behavioral observations in PointClickCare each shift. • Serve on the unit fall-prevention committee; unit fall rate fell from 4.1 to 2.6 per 1,000 resident days over 18 months. • Precept new CNAs through 3-week orientation — 9 aides trained, 8 still on staff. Certified Nursing Assistant Maple Grove Care Center — Dublin, OH Jun 2020 – Mar 2022 • Delivered direct care for 15–18 residents per shift across long-term and short-stay rehab. • Assisted PT and OT with restorative walking and range-of-motion programs for 20+ residents weekly. • Maintained perfect attendance across 2 consecutive years on night shift. Home Health Aide BrightPath Home Care — Columbus, OH Sep 2019 – Jun 2020 • Supported 6 clients in-home with personal care, meal preparation, and medication reminders. SKILLS ADL assistance, vital signs, safe patient transfers and Hoyer lift, fall prevention, infection control and PPE, catheter and ostomy care, wound observation, intake and output charting, dementia and behavioral care, end-of-life care, EHR charting (PointClickCare, MEDITECH) EDUCATION State-Approved Nurse Aide Training Program — Columbus State Community College, 2019 (120 hours) High School Diploma — Westland High School, 2018 Notice what the summary does: it names the setting, the tenure, and the actual patient load. "Compassionate caregiver dedicated to providing quality patient care" would occupy the same space and tell a staffing coordinator nothing they can schedule around.

CNA resume example: newly certified, no paid experience

If you finished your program last month, the resume changes shape but not order. Certification still leads, because it is still the thing being verified. What replaces the work history is your clinical training — which is real, supervised, documented experience, and you should write it as such. SUMMARY Newly certified CNA (Ohio Nurse Aide Registry, active Jul 2026) with 120 program hours including 40 hours of supervised clinical rotation in skilled nursing. Seeking a long-term care position on nights or weekends. CLINICAL EXPERIENCE Nurse Aide Clinical Rotation Oakhaven Skilled Nursing — Columbus, OH Apr 2026 – Jun 2026 | 40 supervised hours • Provided ADL care for 6–8 residents per shift under RN supervision, including bathing, dressing, and assisted feeding. • Recorded vital signs and intake/output; documented in facility EHR with preceptor review. • Completed two-person transfers and mechanical lift operation to program competency standards. Then add whatever paid work you have had, whatever it was. Retail, food service, warehouse, childcare — it goes in a WORK EXPERIENCE section below the clinical block, written to emphasize the parts that transfer: reliability on a schedule, working under time pressure, handling people having a bad day, following documented procedure. Two specifics worth including at this stage. Your program hours, because 120 hours reads differently from the 75-hour federal floor, and many programs exceed it. Your availability — nights, weekends, doubles, per diem. Long-term care staffing runs on shift coverage, and a new CNA who is openly available for the shifts nobody wants is a substantially more attractive hire than one who is not. Say it in the summary. What not to do: do not switch to a skills-based format to disguise the absence of work history. It removes the job-title-employer-dates pattern that applicant tracking systems use to build your record, and it reads to a hiring manager as though something is being hidden — when in fact you have nothing to hide. Newly certified is a normal thing to be.

The skills that belong on a CNA resume

Pull skills from the posting first — that is where the terms the employer will search for are written in their own words. When a posting is thin, O*NET, the US Department of Labor's occupational database, lists the tasks associated with the role in language employers recognize: "Turn or reposition bedridden patients," "Record vital signs, such as temperature, blood pressure, pulse, or respiration rate," "Provide physical support to assist patients to perform daily living activities." Two categories get skipped most often and both matter. EHR systems are a genuine screening filter — a facility running PointClickCare wants someone who has charted in it, and ONET lists Epic Systems and MEDITECH among the software used in the role. Name the systems you have actually used. And equipment competencies* — Hoyer and sit-to-stand lifts, gait belts, mechanical transfers — are the difference between an aide who can be assigned a heavy-transfer hall on day one and one who cannot. Keep the list to things you could do tomorrow without supervision. A skills line is a set of claims a charge nurse will test on your first shift.

40 examples across 5 groups

Numbers that actually exist in CNA work

Resume advice tells everyone to quantify their bullets, and for CNAs that advice produces some genuinely strange writing. You will find example resumes claiming things like "increased resident engagement by 40%" — a number no aide has ever been given, measured against a baseline that does not exist. A charge nurse reads that and knows immediately it was invented. The fix is not to drop numbers. It is to use the ones your job actually generates. Patient or resident load per shift. The most useful number on a CNA resume and the most commonly omitted. "12–14 residents per shift" tells a staffing coordinator exactly what you can handle. A range is fine and more honest than a single figure. Unit size and setting. "40-bed memory care unit," "28-bed post-surgical floor," "6 in-home clients." This establishes scale and specialty in four words. Shift and schedule. Nights, weekends, doubles, per diem, 12-hour rotations. This is scheduling information, and scheduling is the constraint the person hiring you is actually solving for. Facility metrics you genuinely contributed to. Fall rates, pressure injury rates, survey outcomes, call-light response times. Only use these if you were part of the committee or program that moved them, and describe your role honestly — "served on the fall-prevention committee; unit fall rate fell from 4.1 to 2.6 per 1,000 resident days" is accurate. "Reduced falls by 37%" claims sole credit for a team outcome. Training and precepting. "Trained 9 new aides through orientation" is verifiable, specific, and signals that your facility trusted you. Attendance and tenure. In a field with the turnover this one has, "2 years on night shift with perfect attendance" is a genuinely strong line, and almost nobody writes it. If you cannot attach a real number to a bullet, leave it unquantified. A specific, honest description beats a fabricated statistic, and the fabricated statistic is the one that ends the interview early.

Tailoring to the setting: long-term care, hospital, home health

CNA is one credential covering several quite different jobs, and the same resume does not compete equally for all of them. Reorder your bullets for the setting you are applying to. Long-term care and skilled nursing. The highest-volume employer of CNAs. Lead with resident load, ADL care, dementia and behavioral experience, restorative programs, and charting in the facility's EHR. Consistency and attendance matter enormously here — a reliable aide who shows up on nights is the whole business. Say so. Hospital and acute care. Often titled PCT, Patient Care Technician, or Nurse Aide rather than CNA, and frequently requiring skills beyond the CNA scope — phlebotomy, EKG, telemetry monitoring. If you have those, they belong high on the page, because they are the differentiator. Emphasize acuity, faster patient turnover, and working alongside RNs on a defined unit. Name the unit type: med-surg, telemetry, ICU step-down, ED. Home health and private duty. One client at a time, largely unsupervised, in someone's house. What matters is judgment, independence, documentation without a charge nurse down the hall, and often a driver's license and reliable transport. Emphasize continuity — long assignments with the same client are a strong signal — plus meal preparation, light housekeeping, and family communication. Agency and per diem. Adaptability across facilities and EHR systems, fast onboarding, and floating between units. Group agency placements under one heading with a single date range and list facilities beneath, so twelve short assignments read as one continuous job rather than instability. One resume file per setting. Rewriting the summary and reordering four bullets takes ten minutes and changes what the first six seconds of reading contains.

Format, length, and getting through the software

Large healthcare employers run applications through applicant tracking systems, and long-term care chains are no exception. The format rules are the same ones that apply to every resume, and they matter here because a mis-parsed certification is a resume that fails the only filter that counts. One page. Almost every CNA resume should be one page. Two is defensible after roughly ten years across multiple facilities, but the bar is high. Single column. No sidebars. A two-column layout is often read straight across, which is how your registry number ends up merged with a skill. Contact details in the body, not in the document header, which many parsers skip. Standard headings — Work Experience, Education, Skills, Certifications. These map to fields. Invented headings do not. Spell out both forms of every credential on first use: "Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA)," "Basic Life Support (BLS)," "Activities of Daily Living (ADLs)." Keyword searches match literally, and you do not know which form the recruiter typed. Dates with months on every entry, in one consistent format, with "Present" for a current role. Export as a text-selectable PDF unless the application asks for Word. Then verify: open it, select all, copy, paste into a plain-text editor. If your name is first, your certification block is intact and legible, and every job shows title, employer, and dates in order, it will parse. If the paste is scrambled, fix the layout before you send it anywhere.