Medical Assistant Resume Sample

Healthcare is a wonderful industry to get into these days, and the future is bright for those entering the field. As the baby boomer generation gets older, the strain on the healthcare system becomes greater and more serious.

The world needs more healthcare professionals.

This sentiment is echoed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who estimate that employment in related occupations is expected to grow 19% by 2024.

Medical assistant positions are expected to grow even more. The job outlook is great for this profession, with the BLS estimating a 23% growth in available positions over the next 7 years. As the research indicates, this is much faster than the average for all occupations.

Also take into consideration that there are several healthcare facilities in every major city, and it becomes clear: there is definitely a job out there for you in this industry.

If you are serious about gaining employment as a medical assistant, you will need to have a polished resume. We can help you do that. Below, we provide three industry-specific tips for writing a great one.

1. Nail Your Medical Assistant Resume Objective

Medical assistants are in demand, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to land a job. As with other professions, there will be competition for every position. Unless you have years of experience and numerous certifications, your resume may blend with all the rest. This is why it’s critical to make yours stand out. You can do this by writing a great career objective.

Your career objective is the first thing the hiring manager reads on a resume, yet it is one of the most misunderstood, unappreciated sections of the document. It is an opportunity to link the position requirements and your relevant skills and experience to show why you’d be an asset to the hiring organization. It is also a chance to make a memorable first impression on the hiring manager.

A great career objective can be written in just three sentences:

1. A self-introduction in which you outline your years of experience and your major tasks and responsibilities
2. A clear statement that outlines how you will use your skills and experience to fulfill your desired position
3. A concluding sentence that highlights how your skills and abilities will allow you to contribute to the future success of the target organization

In the sample above, the applicant composed a resume objective using this format. Let’s take a look at it line-by-line:

– Attentive Medical Assistant with 5 years of experience in performing administrative and clinical tasks in various healthcare environments.

In this sentence, she clearly states her occupation, years of experience, and her major responsibilities. She is concise and direct. The hiring manager knows that she is experienced and competent.

– Looking to apply my background in managed healthcare to help fulfill any medical assistant needs at [target organization].

Here, the applicant clearly identifies the position she is applying for, and emphasizes that her background in healthcare will help her fulfill that role. This is a great sentence for a career objective, because hiring managers want to know how you can improve their organizations, not how they can help you.

– My experience as a medical assistant and ability to thrive using different medical technologies will allow me to immediately contribute toward the welfare of your hospital and its patients.

For the last sentence, she articulates how her experience and skills will benefit the target organization. To the hiring manager, she will seem driven, committed, and a team player.

A career objective crafted in this way will leave a lasting impression on a hiring manager. It is an essential part of your resume, and should be written carefully. If you need additional help with yours, check out our guide on writing a winning resume objective.

2. Emphasize A Range of Abilities

All major healthcare facilities have medical assistants on the payroll. They play an integral role among allied health professionals because their responsibilities are many and wide-ranging, covering several different disciplines.

Their duties include administrative tasks like scheduling and retrieving medical records, clinical tasks such as dressing wounds and performing venipunctures, and custodial tasks like cleaning rooms and equipment. A lot of the work other medical professionals do is made easier by their efforts.

Hiring managers at healthcare facilities know how important medical assistants are, so they’ll be looking to hire candidates who are multitalented and competent. Being a specialist is nice, but being able to fill a lot of different roles at once is better for this position. This is why you should highlight a range of skills and abilities.

Listing relevant skills in your skills section is one way to achieve this. However, a more thorough way is to put down some key, bulleted points in your professional experience section. This method allows you to include more skills, and also let the hiring manager know that you’ve successfully done these things in the past.

Let’s take a look at some examples from the sample resume above:

– Record, manage, and update patient information and medical histories in accordance with HIPAA regulations

– Perform venipunctures and injections more than 15 times a day

– Clean and sanitize tools and equipment daily

We can see in these three bulleted statements that the applicant has performed a wide variety of tasks. It might seem like a good idea to emphasize only the clinical side of your skills and experience, but it is much more effective to include a range of skills.

If you need more help writing your experience section, have a look at the professional experience portion of our resume writing guide.

3. Include Certification Information

Advancements in medical technologies in recent years have led to patients increasingly expecting a positive outcome when they see a healthcare professional.

Unfortunately, this is not always possible, and unsatisfied patients often resort to legal means to reconcile what they feel was a failure by the healthcare organization.

To protect themselves from costly legal challenges, employers of healthcare professionals increasingly require their staff to be credentialed and certified. They have concluded that having certified healthcare professionals on staff will lessen the likelihood of successful lawsuits.

Additionally, certain articles of regulatory organizations like OSHA and CLIA are making the mandatory certification of medical personnel an inevitable next step.

Presently, medical assistants do not require certification in most states. However, due to the current legal climate, it is becoming more and more important to employers that they be certified. For this reason, it is essential that you include your certification information.

This can be done in the education section of your resume. You should include not only the certifications you have obtained, but also the years you got them. They need to be updated every so often, so it is important to hiring managers to know that your credentials are up to date.

If you have several certifications that you would like to emphasize to the hiring manager, you can use a qualifications summary in place of the career objective. This is a more modern way of writing a resume introduction which has been successful for many people. You can read more about qualifications summaries in our writing guide.

Need more help? You can also get started making your resume right away with our professional resume builder.