House Officer / House Job Doctor CV example

What recruiters expect

Before writing anything, it helps to know what the person reading is checking for. In this field that is usually a short, specific list:

• Each rotation listed separately, with the specialty, the unit, the exact dates and the duration in months.
• Procedures described with the correct supervision level, matching your logbook.
• Provisional or full registration status stated plainly.
• Current life support certification with expiry dates.
• Any audit, teaching, presentation or departmental contribution, which is what separates otherwise identical applicants.
• Clinical referees, normally the consultants who supervised your rotations.

Recommended CV structure

This is the running order the example uses. It is a starting point rather than a rule, but the order reflects what tends to be read first in this profession.

1. Profile — Three or four lines positioning you for the role.
2. Medical Registration — Practising licences and regulator registrations.
3. Medical Education — Degrees, diplomas and school-leaving qualifications.
4. House Job Rotations — Specialty rotations with dates and supervising unit.
5. Clinical Skills & Procedures — Grouped skills, for example "Languages" and "Tooling".
6. Audit & Quality Improvement — Research projects, studies and audits.
7. Certifications & Courses — Completed certifications with the issuing body.
8. Presentations & Conferences — Talks given and conferences attended.
9. Teaching Experience — Lecturing, demonstrating and supervision.
10. Professional Memberships — Bodies you belong to, with membership numbers where relevant.
11. Volunteer Experience — Unpaid roles that show relevant skills.
12. Languages — Spoken languages with CEFR levels.
13. References — Referees, or a line saying they are available on request.

Sections worth adding

• Prizes & Awards — Undergraduate prizes still count at this stage and should be included.
• Publications — Add if you have a case report or a co-authored paper, however small.

Skills worth including

Grouped rather than listed in one block. Grouping makes a long list readable and shows that you can tell the difference between the things you use daily and the things you have touched.

Beyond the technical list: Reliability on a demanding rota, Asking for help early, Clear written documentation, Working with nursing and allied health colleagues, Maintaining composure during acute deterioration. These belong inside your experience bullets, demonstrated, rather than in a list of adjectives.

Example professional summary

Three or four lines, positioned for the role rather than describing your personality. Two versions you can adapt:

MBBS graduate currently completing a 12-month rotating house job across General Medicine, General Surgery, Paediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Independent in venepuncture, cannulation, arterial blood gas sampling and catheterisation following supervised sign-off. Led a re-audit of VTE risk assessment that raised completion from 68% to 91%, and run regular teaching for third-year students.

House officer with nine months of the rotating internship completed and a particular interest in acute medicine. Maintain a countersigned procedure logbook, hold current BLS certification, and presented a departmental audit on discharge summary completeness.

Writing your experience

The difference between a CV that gets a call and one that does not is almost always in the bullet points. Each pair below shows a real rewrite of the kind of line that appears on most CVs in this field.

Taken from the example

The sample CV for this profession is fully written. A few sections from it, so you can see the level of specificity that works:

Rotations

• General Medicine — Three months. Covered a 40-bed medical ward with three other house officers on a one-in-four night rota.
• General Surgery — Three months. Covered a 30-bed surgical ward with two other house officers.
• Paediatrics — Three months. Clerked paediatric admissions including bronchiolitis, acute gastroenteritis with dehydration and febrile illness.

Audit and research

• Re-audit: VTE risk assessment completion within 24 hours of admission — Reviewed 100 medical admissions against the hospital standard requiring assessment within 24 hours.
• Audit: legibility and completeness of discharge summaries — Reviewed 60 surgical discharge summaries against four required elements.

Education

• MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery), Dow University of Health Sciences — Second Division with distinction in Community Medicine

Certifications and registration

• Provisional registration as a medical practitioner — Pakistan Medical and Dental Council
• Basic Life Support (BLS) Provider — American Heart Association
• Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) Provider — American Heart Association
• Infection Prevention and Control (hospital induction module) — Civil Hospital Karachi

Common mistakes

ATS considerations

Applicant tracking systems behave differently by sector, and generic advice is often wrong for a given field. These points are specific to house officer / house job doctor applications:

• Name each rotation with its full specialty title and the number of months, because selection often counts specialty exposure directly.
• State registration status exactly: "provisionally registered", "permanently registered", or the equivalent in your jurisdiction.
• List life support certification with the awarding body and expiry date; expired certificates are a routine screening failure.
• Avoid tables. Many medical applications require you to paste sections into an online form, and tables do not survive.

The Minimal ATS layout is built for this, and the ATS guide covers what parsers do to a file in more detail.

Guides that go deeper

This page applies general CV advice to one field. The full treatment of each part is here:

• How to Write a Medical CV — Medical CVs follow their own conventions. Applying commercial CV advice to one is the fastest way to be marked down.
• How to Describe Work Experience — The difference between listing duties and demonstrating impact, and a repeatable way to rewrite any weak bullet point.
• How to List Skills on a CV — Group them, be specific, and cut anything you would not want to be interviewed on for ten minutes.
• How to Make an ATS-Friendly CV — What applicant tracking systems do to your file, the four failures that matter, and which of the usual claims about them anybody can actually stand behind.

Questions about house officer / house job doctor CVs