From pre and peri to postoperative, you provide patient care in the oral surgeon’s office, sterilizing equipment and helping with vital monitoring during oral surgery.
But having a great resume to pass off to a recruiter isn’t as familiar to you as X-rays and molar reconstructions!
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! After years of helping folks settle into their field, we’ve formulated these five oral surgery assistant resume templates and some solid cover letter writing advice for you.
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Experience Sections
Interpersonal and technical skills are incredibly important during the oral surgery process since you’ll be handling everything from administering anesthesia to providing patients with care instructions to take home.
Recruiters need to see that you can do both! Just keep your soft skills as relevant as possible (“patient education,” not “communication”) and try to focus on technical abilities that are unique to oral surgery.
Be specific, too! The skills on your resume should automatically look more specific when you tailor them to your profession. Still, some can be niched down further, like “extractions” or “clinical sedation.”
9 top oral surgery assistant skills
- Clinical Sedation
- X-Rays
- Patient Education
- EMR
- Fabrication
- Extractions
- Vital Signs
- Instrument Sterilization
- Postoperative Care
Sample oral surgery assistant work experience bullet points
Skills are fantastic, but recruiters want to hear about how you put them to good use while ensuring top-quality dental X-rays or reducing operation times by providing efficient assistance.
Make sure each example you include relates directly to your role in the oral operating room: While you can use experience points from other roles that don’t relate, you should always ensure that the bullet points themselves are highly relevant.
And always use metrics to reinforce your positive impact! Quantifiable data like referral success rates and patient satisfaction percentages make your claims more credible.
Here are some effective samples:
- Fabricated over 98 mouth guards, temporary crowns, custom impression trays, bleach trays, and casting models each month, earning a 8.6/10 employee rating
- Managed and stocked 98% of treatment areas/carts and dental-related facility inventory to ensure streamlined patient care, boosting satisfaction rates by 16%
- Scanned patient care documents into patient charts in EpicCare and ordered medical records from outside medical/dental facilities, reducing documentation error rates by 9%
- Organized referrals to Oral Medicine, Neurology, and Infectious Disease clinics and optimized referral system, improving efficiency by 12%
Top 5 Tips for Your Oral Surgery Assistant Resume
- Highlight certifications
- If you have applicable credentials in your field, such as an Intravenous Clinical Sedation or Basic Life Support Certification, make sure they stand out!
- Keep your layout clean
- Try out our resume templates and use whatever one makes your personal experiences, skills, and other sections look most impressive. Your layout should be as clean and professional-looking as that tray of sterilized dental implements!
- Show soft skills through experience
- An oral surgery assistant’s soft skills are usually best highlighted throughout the experience section. Let your skills list have a more technical focus, and show your kind bedside manner through experience context.
- About that context . . .
- Vary context to make your accomplishments more memorable. It only takes a few words to brighten things up: Mention that you stocked inventory to improve patient care before bolstering that point with the metrics for improving efficiency.
- Vary your metrics
- Try to switch up your metric types when you can to keep your resume engaging. Reference efficiency and satisfaction percentages, but include manual hour reductions or star ratings, too.
Keep it short and sweet at just one page! If your resume overflows when you add that awesome story about how you came up with a new patient referral strategy, set it aside for your cover letter instead.
Oh, yeah—make sure you include that Dental Assistant or Surgical Technology degree! Add any independent classes you might have taken that relate to dentistry, too.
Professional references from professors who saw you excel at your anesthesia assignments or former coworkers who loved how you helped everyone with patient referrals can be great! Just attach them separately.
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
