Radiologic Technologist Resume Guide: Modalities, Volume, Dose

A practical guide from the team behind PlainResume, the free resume builder.

A trauma-center second shift, an outpatient center doing scheduled extremities, and a mobile x-ray route are all "rad tech" jobs with different pressures. The resume should let a manager place you in theirs within a few seconds.

The credential block, under your name

Registration with the disciplines spelled out, the state license or permit with its expiration, BLS, and contrast or IV certification where your state allows it. Managers check currency before they read anything else, and a lapsed card buried in the work history wastes the screening. If a post-primary exam is coming, give its date the way the certifications guide recommends rather than leaving it off.

Modalities are the spine

• Registered: the disciplines ARRT holds you in — radiography, CT, MR, mammography, vascular-interventional, cardiac-interventional.
• Cross-trained: each one with the volume behind it, so "cross-trained in CT, roughly 300 independent exams including trauma head and C-spine" instead of "CT experience."
• In progress: competencies signed off and the exam date.

Then the exam range itself: routine and trauma radiography, portables and ICU work, OR and C-arm cases — the surgical side that overlaps with what a surgical tech sees from the sterile field — fluoroscopy and swallow studies, arthrograms, pediatric and bariatric adaptations, dedicated bone density. Cross-training is also the clearest way up: CT is the usual next step, and it changes what you're worth to a hospital.

Setting and volume, in the department's units

Say the facility type and size, the shift, your exams per shift, how many rooms you covered, whether you worked solo, and what call looked like. Solo coverage and call are worth naming explicitly, because they're the hardest slots to fill — and if you'll take evenings, nights or weekends, put that in the contact line as the shift guide suggests. Use counts your RIS would confirm; estimates should read as estimates.

Positioning, dose, and the quality evidence

This is where good rad tech resumes separate themselves. Write your repeat rate if your department tracked it, your shielding and collimation practice, ALARA habits and technique charts or dose-reduction protocol work, pediatric technique adjustments, and any protocol building or QC duties — monitor QC, phantom testing, equipment checks, inventory of contrast and supplies. Add contrast administration, screening for reactions and allergy histories, and your part in a reaction response if you've managed one. Include the patient-care side plainly: transfers and lift equipment, immobilization, trauma and code imaging, and communicating with confused, intoxicated or frightened patients. Then the systems by name — PACS and RIS, the EMR (Epic, Cerner), vendor equipment you've run, dose-monitoring software — because those are literal screening terms.

New graduates, and where the job leads

New grads: lead with exam status or pass date and license application, then write clinical rotations as the experience they are — sites and their types, logged exam volume and range, competencies completed, modalities rotated through. Patient-facing work before school counts for reliability; if you came from CNA, medical assisting or patient registration, keep a short line on it rather than deleting it.

Later, the ladder reads as scope: lead or charge technologist, modality specialist, interventional and special procedures, mammography, applications or PACS administration, clinical instructor for a program's students. Write those as responsibility you carried, which is the same trust-marker logic that moves anyone up a rung.

Frequently asked questions