# Skills Nurses Have: What Matters Beyond Clinical Training Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-nurses-have/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-nurses-have.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The skills nurses have go beyond clinical training: communication, SBAR handoffs, teamwork, prioritizing, knowing when to escalate, resilience. All learnable. ## Key facts - Title: Skills Nurses Have: What Matters Beyond Clinical Training - Category: Skills Standards and Frameworks - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Building Resilience - Primary keyword: skills nurses have - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-nurses-have/ ## What this page covers - The skills nurses have go beyond clinical training: communication, SBAR handoffs, teamwork, prioritizing, knowing when to escalate, resilience. All learnable. - Practical guidance for skills nurses have - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The skills nurses have fall into two groups: clinical skills such as patient assessment and medication management, and the interpersonal skills that carry that knowledge to patients and colleagues — communicating with patients and families, structured handoffs, teamwork across shifts, speaking up, prioritizing a patient load, knowing when to escalate, and resilience. All of them can be learned. If you are finishing nursing school or a few months into your first unit, the second group can feel harder to pin down, and it is tempting to read it as personality: some people are simply made for this work, and the rest are not. That is not how these skills work. The clinical list changes with the specialty you choose. The second list goes with you to every unit, which is why it is worth knowing in detail. ## The skills nurses have beyond the clinical list Clinical skills are taught and assessed formally in nursing education, and the exact set depends on where you end up: a cardiac unit and a pediatric ward ask for different procedures. The interpersonal skills work differently. They are used in every specialty, and they are where a new nurse's first year does much of its teaching. The need to strengthen communication and collaboration in new graduate nurses is well documented; OJIN, the American Nurses Association's Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, has published an evidence-based approach to improving exactly those skills in graduate nurses. That makes them the expected learning curve of a new nurse rather than a sign you chose the wrong profession, and they respond to deliberate practice. If you would like to know which of them will ask the most of you, it is worth [finding your own development areas](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) while you still have placements to practice on. ### 1. Clinical skills Patient assessment, medication management and the procedures of your specialty are the foundation, and nursing education teaches and tests them directly. Around them sits a practical layer that is easy to overlook: nurses rely on technology for daily work, from electronic health records to documentation systems, so basic computer literacy is part of the job. Expect the clinical list to grow and shift with the unit you join. The rest of this list will not. ### 2. Communicating with patients and families Much of nursing is explanation: what a medication does, what the next procedure involves, what happens after discharge. The people listening are often frightened, in pain, or new to medical language, and how clearly you explain decides whether they feel comfortable and whether they trust you. The skill rests on concrete behaviors rather than natural warmth. Give the person your full attention, use plain words instead of clinical shorthand, and check that the message landed by asking them to tell you, in their own words, what happens next. Family members get the same treatment: the same patience, the same plain words. ### 3. Structured handoffs with SBAR Every time a patient passes from one nurse to the next, or a nurse calls a physician about a change in condition, information has to travel without getting lost. SBAR — Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation — is a fixed four-part order for doing exactly that. A 2018 narrative review in the journal Safety in Health describes SBAR as a reliable, validated communication tool that has been shown to reduce adverse events in hospitals, improve communication among healthcare providers and promote patient safety. The reason it works is standardization. The person handing over always states the situation, the relevant background, their own assessment and a recommendation, in that order, so the listener knows what is coming and notices what is missing. For a new nurse this is good news: one of the most important communication skills in nursing turns out to be a structure you can learn and rehearse. ### 4. Teamwork across shifts and roles No nurse covers a patient alone. Care passes from nurse to nurse at every handover and is shared with physicians, pharmacists, therapists and aides, so each person depends on the others doing what they committed to and passing on what the next person needs to know. Trust on a unit is built from that reliability: a task finished before handover rather than left for the next shift, a colleague helped when the unit is stretched, information shared rather than kept. Working across professions also means expecting a pharmacist or a physician to reason about the same patient differently from you, and treating that difference as useful rather than as friction. ### 5. Speaking up to senior colleagues Hierarchy makes it harder for a new nurse to raise a concern with a physician or an experienced colleague, and staying quiet is a recognized way for clinical communication to fail. The fix is less about courage than about format. Because SBAR ends with a recommendation, you say what you think is needed, such as asking the physician to come and assess the patient now, instead of describing the situation and hoping the other person draws the conclusion. Being clear and direct with someone senior is part of keeping patients safe, and like everything else on this list, it gets easier with rehearsal. ### 6. Prioritizing a patient load A nurse cares for several patients at once, and their needs compete for the same hour: scheduled medications, assessments, documentation, admissions and discharges, and everything nobody planned for. Time management in nursing therefore means [putting tasks in order of urgency](/knowledge/time-management/managing-competing-priorities/) and organizing the shift so care arrives on time, then reordering the moment a patient's condition changes. It is one of the first skills a full patient load tests, and it becomes far more manageable when you plan the shift on paper at the start and review that plan as the hours move on. ### 7. Judgment and knowing when to escalate Nurses make decisions under time pressure, sometimes in emergencies. Protocols and scope of practice set out [which decisions are yours](/knowledge/decision-making/decision-making-authority/); judgment decides when a situation has crossed the line where something must happen. Often the most important decision is not what to do yourself but whether a change in a patient's condition needs to go to a physician or a senior nurse, and then raising it clearly and without delay. Knowing your own authority, and acting within it with confidence, matters as much as any single call you make. ### 8. Resilience through the first year The first months of practice are demanding in ways school cannot fully rehearse. In a longitudinal study of new graduate nurses in an oncology program, published in the Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing, resilience declined significantly from the start of the program to the six-month mark, while improvements in organizational and communication skills only emerged at twelve months. The authors concluded that residency programs and resilience support may need to run beyond the traditional one-year period. In that study, the hardest stretch came before the skills that ease it had matured. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described the physical side of that adjustment, after long, hands-on days in her first job as a teacher: > When I came home after a full day of work, I was completely finished. I was so tired that I could sleep for three hours afterward. I had never experienced anything like that before. Her job was teaching rather than nursing, but what she describes belongs to the first months of full-time work in general: the energy runs out before the routines that protect it are in place. A dip in the first half-year is not proof that you are unsuited to the work. Resilience is something you build deliberately, and it is easier to start before the hard months than in the middle of them. ## How to build these skills and show them Placements and your first months on a unit are the practice ground for all of this. A few deliberate habits turn ordinary shifts into progress, and into evidence you can point to later. - Use SBAR for every handover, even the informal ones, until the order is automatic. Afterward, notice which follow-up questions the receiving nurse still had to ask. - After explaining something to a patient, ask them to tell you what happens next in their own words. Where they stumble shows you what to explain differently. - Write your priorities down at the start of each shift and revisit them each time something changes. - When you are unsure whether to escalate, take the question to a senior colleague using the same four steps, recommendation included. - After a difficult shift, talk it through with one colleague you trust before you head home, rather than replaying it alone. - On a résumé or in an interview, [replace adjectives with examples](/knowledge/soft-skills-at-work/how-to-list-soft-skills-on-resume/): not "strong communicator" but a handover you structured, a family you kept informed, a concern you escalated and what happened next. ## What makes a good shift possible Look back over the list and a pattern shows. Almost all of it happens between people — at the bedside, at handover, on the phone to a physician — and the rest is about staying steady while it happens. **Communication** in nursing runs on a few habits you can practice on every shift: state the main point first, keep it brief when time is short, and adapt how you explain something to the person in front of you, because a frightened patient needs a different version from a physician on the phone. Full attention and real listening do much of the work. The hard moments are predictable ones: an angry relative, a disagreement you need to voice, an apology you owe. None of it depends on being naturally warm; each piece is a behavior you can rehearse. **Teamwork** on a unit comes down to trust, and trust is built from small, repeated things: doing what you said you would before your shift ends, sharing what you know instead of keeping it, and asking where the team needs you when the unit is stretched. It does not mean always agreeing. When you think a plan is wrong, say so without making it personal, and once the team has decided, carry the decision out loyally. Holding a colleague to a commitment that slipped, respectfully and promptly, belongs here too. **Building Resilience** is what lets you care about patients without carrying every hard shift home. It is a method, not a thick skin: put your energy into what you can control, catch the automatic thought after a bad moment ("I'm not cut out for this") before it decides how you react, ask how likely the thing you fear really is, and talk with colleagues you trust instead of coping alone. Feeling the weight of the work is not the problem; leaving it unprocessed is. You do not have to wait for your first performance review on a unit to learn how these three stand. The free Job Skills Test shows [where each of them stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) today, and because teamwork is just one of **twelve work skills** the test covers, you see these three in the context of the rest. Every one of them improves with practice. ## Look for it in your last placement Think back to your last placement or shift. Perhaps a patient visibly relaxed once you explained what the next hour would bring, or the nurse who took over from you had no follow-up questions. Moments like those are this list in miniature, and each one was something you did, not something you were born with. Where gaps remain, they are the parts you have not practiced yet, not a verdict on whether nursing suits you, and closing them does not ask you to become a different person. They count for more once you carry a full patient load on your own and the call to the physician is yours to make, which makes now, while experienced colleagues are still close at hand, a good time to pick the skill that matters most for you and begin. Knowing where you start makes that choice easy. ## Choose your first skill to work on All that remains is to turn this into a plan. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills: in 7 minutes it shows where you stand across all twelve, communication, teamwork and resilience among them, and which ones will make the biggest difference for you right now. Take it before your next placement or shift, choose the one skill it points to, and consider asking a preceptor or a colleague you trust to watch for it with you. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The skills nurses have go beyond clinical training: communication, SBAR handoffs, teamwork, prioritizing, knowing when to escalate, resilience. All learnable. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Building Resilience. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/skills-standards/skills-nurses-have/ Preferred summary: "The skills nurses have go beyond clinical training: communication, SBAR handoffs, teamwork, prioritizing, knowing when to escalate, resilience. All learnable." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.