A midwife CV lands in front of someone with one question before all the others: can this person legally work here from the first shift? Answer that at the top of the page, then show where you have practised and the kind of care you gave, with nothing that could point to a real woman or baby.
Put your registration on the first line
Your registration goes directly under your name, above any profile text. A shortlister scanning twenty applications should not have to hunt for it.
Registered Midwife, NMC PIN 12A3456E (made-up example), renewal due March 2028
The wording depends on where you work, so check the rules for your country. In the UK that means your NMC PIN and your status on the register. Ireland, Australia and other countries have their own regulators, and in the US a midwifery resume usually opens with the state license and the CNM or CM credential. If you trained abroad and your application is still moving through the regulator, say which stage it has reached. Do not leave the reader to assume it is finished, because most employers will look you up, and the name on your CV should match the name on the register exactly.
For the general layout across regulated jobs, see our piece on professional registration on a CV. If you also hold nursing registration, the nurse CV guide covers that side of your history.
Use settings as your unit of experience
Plenty of midwives have held the same job title at the same hospital for six years and rotated through half the building. "Midwife, Northfield General, 2019 to present" hides all of it. A manager recruiting for a birth centre wants to see birth centre months, and a community lead wants to know you have worked alone in someone's front room at 3am with the nearest colleague twenty minutes away.
So split each post by setting: labour ward, birth centre, community, antenatal clinic, postnatal ward, and neonatal support such as transitional care. Give each one a duration and a line about the shape of the work. Say what kind of unit it was, because consultant-led, alongside and freestanding are different jobs. The size of a unit is public information and tells the reader a lot, so use it.
Here is a short entry. The employer and every figure in it are invented.
Midwife, Northfield General Hospital, 2021 to present
- Labour ward, 22 months: consultant-led unit with about 4,000 births a year. Shift coordinator on nights for the last six months, covering a team of eight.
- Alongside birth centre, 14 months: low-risk care, water birth, transfers to the labour ward when needed.
- Community, 16 months: caseload team of six in a mixed urban area, with home births on an on-call rota.
Notice that the entry has no clinical stories. It tells the reader where you have worked, at what level of responsibility, and how recently. Put the most recent setting first, unless the job you want sits further down the list, in which case consider a short profile line that names it.
Describe your caseload without patient data
You can say a great deal about your caseload while saying nothing about any person. Describe the type of care and the setting, and leave the stories out. Compare these two lines:
- Weak and risky: "Cared for a 19-year-old from a village near Northfield through a twin pregnancy and premature birth in May 2023."
- Better: "Continuity care for women with complex social needs, including young mothers, as part of a community caseload team."
The first line includes an age, a location and a date, which is enough to identify someone in a small area. Rare events make this worse. If your unit had a single set of triplets that year, "the triplet delivery" is an identifier even with no name attached, and colleagues reading your CV will know exactly who you mean.
The same goes for initials, hospital numbers, quotes from thank-you cards and anything else lifted from a record. A figure about your own workload is fine if it is an aggregate: "a caseload of around 36 women a year" says something about you and nothing about them. If you pull totals from a revalidation portfolio or a logbook, use the totals only. Before you quote audit results, check that your employer is happy for them to leave the building.
Our article on LinkedIn for nurses applies the same privacy thinking to a public profile.
Back up skills with dates and audits
A bare list that says "CTG interpretation, breastfeeding support, safeguarding" could sit on any midwife's CV. Dates and named training do the work here, because a reader wants to know that you are current. These are the items worth listing if they are true for you:
- Obstetric emergency drills, with the name of the programme and the year you last attended
- CTG interpretation training and any competency assessment that goes with it
- Neonatal resuscitation training, with the course name and date
- Safeguarding training at the level you hold
- Breastfeeding support, plus any infant feeding role you took on for the unit
- Extended skills, such as newborn examination or suturing, if your employer has signed you off
Audit work is where a midwife can stand out, and it is often the part left off. Name the audit or guideline, give the year, and be honest about your part. "Collected data for the 2024 re-audit of fetal monitoring documentation on the labour ward; findings went into the unit's guideline review" is believable. "Led a quality improvement initiative" is not, because it could mean anything. If you only collected the data, say that. Panels know how much work it takes, and they often ask you about it at interview.
Newly qualified and experienced CVs do different jobs
If you are newly qualified, your training is your experience, so treat it that way. List your placements by setting and length, with a line about what you did in each. Put your degree high up, along with your registration status, any elective and your dissertation topic if it connects to the post. Mention the preceptorship you are looking for, if the employer offers one. A previous career counts too: a former maternity support worker or teacher should say so in one line rather than leave a gap. Students applying before they qualify can follow the same approach and flag the expected registration date.
If you are experienced, the job of the CV changes. Your first post from 2012 can shrink to a single line, and the space goes to what a junior candidate cannot show: coordinating shifts, supporting student midwives as an assessor, sitting on a governance group, holding a lead role such as bereavement or infant feeding. Moving from hospital to community? Reorder your settings so community comes first, and include a driving licence if the post requires it. Going the other way, make your recent labour ward exposure visible, even if it was a short rotation, and be plain about any gap in acute work.
Before you send it
Run through this list with the job description open.
- Check that your registration line matches the register exactly, including your name and renewal date.
- Read each setting line and ask whether the reader could tell what your shift looked like.
- Search the document for ages, place names and dates attached to any woman or baby, and remove them.
- Put a year next to every mandatory training item you list.
- Cut anything the advert does not need, and aim for two pages.
If your LinkedIn profile already holds your posts and dates, Postulit can turn it into a first CV draft, and you can then split it by setting and add your registration line. Whichever route you take, send the finished version to one midwife you trust and ask her which line she would question at interview.