Physician Assistant Resume Example & Guide
A real example, 9 bullet points you can copy, salary ranges, and the specific things that get physician assistant resumes rejected.
PA resumes are read by two audiences with different priorities. Credentialing needs NCCPA certification, state license, DEA and NPI numbers, and clean verifiable dates. The hiring physician needs to know what you can actually do unsupervised on day one. A resume that satisfies only the first gets you credentialed slowly and hired never.
The clinical answer comes down to procedures and volume. 'Assisted in surgery' is a rotation-level statement. 'First assist on 300+ laparoscopic cholecystectomies and hernia repairs' is a hire-level one. List your procedures by name with approximate volumes — central lines, joint injections, laceration repair, lumbar punctures, endoscopy assists, casting — because that list is the fastest read of your independence.
Specialty matters more in PA hiring than in most clinical fields, and lateral moves are common. If you are switching from emergency medicine to orthopaedics, do not let the reader infer the overlap — name the procedures, patient populations, and skills that carry across, and be direct about what you will need to learn.
What hiring managers look for in a physician assistant resume
- PA-C with NCCPA certification, state license, DEA and NPI numbers
- Procedures performed, with approximate volumes and level of supervision
- Patient volume per shift or clinic day, and setting acuity
- Specialty depth, plus any rotations that support a lateral move
- Prescriptive authority, credentialing history, and EMR by name
Certifications and licences for physician assistant roles
List these near the top of your resume. In this field they are eligibility requirements, not accomplishments — a recruiter cannot advance you without them.
- PA-C — NCCPA certification (number, recertification date)
- State PA license (number, expiration)
- DEA registration and NPI number
- ACLS / BLS / PALS
- ATLS — Advanced Trauma Life Support (specialty-dependent)
- CAQ — Certificate of Added Qualifications (specialty-dependent)
Physician Assistant salary range
Approximate US ranges for guidance when you are setting expectations or preparing to negotiate. Actual pay varies considerably by city, employer size, and industry.
Entry
$100K – $118K
0–2 years
Mid
$118K – $140K
3–7 years
Senior
$140K – $172K
8+ years
Physician Assistant resume example
A Anchor layout filled with sample content. Every template on NavPeer is built to parse cleanly through applicant tracking systems — no text boxes, no sidebars that scramble your work history.
Physician Assistant resume summary example
Three to four sentences at the top of the page, written in the first person without saying “I”. Rewrite it for every application — the summary is the cheapest place to show you read the job description.
9 physician assistant resume bullet points you can adapt
Copy any of these and replace the specifics with your own. The numbers here are realistic examples, not claims to borrow — swap in what actually happened, because you will be asked about every figure on your resume.
- Evaluate and manage 20–24 patients per shift in a 42-bed Level II trauma emergency department, independently working up and dispositioning the full acuity range.
- Perform 400+ laceration repairs, 120+ ultrasound-guided central lines, and routine incision and drainage, arthrocentesis, and fracture reduction with conscious sedation.
- Serve as first assist on 300+ laparoscopic cholecystectomies, appendectomies, and hernia repairs, including port placement and closure.
- Prescribe under full state prescriptive authority including Schedule II–V, with an antibiotic stewardship audit consistently above the department's 90% appropriateness target.
- Reduced door-to-provider time in the fast-track area from 38 to 19 minutes by restructuring the PA triage workflow with nursing leadership.
- Precept PA students from three programmes, supervising roughly 1,000 clinical hours annually and serving on the clinical site's education committee.
- Maintain E/M coding accuracy above 96% on quarterly audit, with documentation cited by the compliance team as a departmental template.
- Manage a panel of roughly 900 patients in a hospital-affiliated orthopaedic clinic, handling injections, casting, post-operative follow-up, and imaging interpretation.
- Led adoption of a sepsis screening protocol in the ED; time to first antibiotic fell from 74 to 41 minutes across the first two quarters.
ATS keywords for this role
Applicant tracking systems match literal strings. Work the ones that genuinely apply to you into your summary, skills section, and bullets — and never into white text or a hidden block, which every modern system detects and most employers treat as disqualifying.
Section-by-section breakdown
Build a credentials block, not a footnote
NCCPA number, state license with expiration, DEA, NPI, and ACLS/BLS/PALS/ATLS as applicable. Credentialing staff pull these before an interview is scheduled, and a resume missing them can add weeks to a start date.
List procedures with volumes
Name the procedure and give an approximate number. Volume is how a supervising physician judges independence, and it is the single largest gap between a rotation-level and a hire-level PA resume.
Handle specialty changes head-on
If you are moving specialties, add a short line naming the transferable procedures and populations. PAs move laterally routinely and hiring physicians expect it — what they will not do is reconstruct the overlap for you.
Counting your clinical hours
Supervised clinical hours are real, documented patient care and belong on the resume as experience entries — facility, unit, hours, patient population, and the skills you performed. Formatting them as a footnote under Education is the most common way strong candidates in this field undersell themselves.
Be precise about what you performed independently versus observed or assisted with. Preceptors and clinical supervisors find out in the first week, and overstating here damages your standing far more than a shorter list would have.
Core skills for this role
A human reviewer scans this section to decide whether to read the rest. Keep it to the skills you would be comfortable being interviewed on in depth.
Mistakes that sink physician assistant resumes
These are the failure modes specific to this role — not general resume advice you have already read a dozen times.
- Writing 'PA' instead of 'PA-C'. The certification is the credential; dropping the C reads as either uncertified or careless.
- Describing procedures without volumes, which leaves the reader unable to tell a rotation from six years of practice.
- Omitting DEA and NPI numbers, slowing credentialing on a resume that has otherwise already won the job.
- Listing rotations as experience years into a career — after your first role, rotations belong in education, not in the work history.
- Ignoring patient volume per shift, which is the clearest available signal of the pace you can sustain.
Frequently asked questions
Related resume examples
Build your physician assistant resume
Start from an ATS-safe template, and let the AI turn your real experience into metric-focused bullets. It never invents an employer, a title, or a number — you approve every line.