Top 12 Registered Pharmacist Skills to Put on Your Resume
In the competitive field of pharmacy, showcasing a well-rounded set of skills on your resume can significantly enhance your employability and career growth. This article highlights the top 12 skills that registered pharmacists should emphasize to stand out in the job market, ensuring they present themselves as invaluable assets to potential employers.
Registered Pharmacist Skills
- Pharmacotherapy
- Compounding
- Medication Therapy Management (MTM)
- Immunization Delivery
- Patient Counseling
- Pharmaceutical Calculations
- Drug Utilization Review (DUR)
- Pyxis MedStation
- Rx30 Pharmacy System
- Clinical Pharmacokinetics
- Inventory Management
- Epic Willow
1. Pharmacotherapy
Pharmacotherapy is the art and science of treating disease with medications—choosing the right drug, dose, and duration, then monitoring and adjusting to reach the best possible outcome for a specific patient.
Why It's Important
It puts pharmacists at the center of safe, effective, personalized care. Better choices, fewer harms, tighter control of chronic conditions—this is where the profession proves its value.
How to Improve Pharmacotherapy Skills
Level up by mixing knowledge with sharp clinical judgment:
Continuous education: Keep current with new drugs, indications, and safety updates through accredited CE and peer-reviewed literature.
Patient-centered care: Use the Pharmacist’s Patient Care Process—assess, plan, implement, follow up—to tailor therapy based on goals, comorbidities, and preferences.
Team-based decisions: Huddle with prescribers, nurses, and specialists to solve sticky problems like polypharmacy and complex titrations.
Decision support: Lean on EHR tools, order sets, and trusted drug information databases while keeping clinical context front and center.
Evidence first: Anchor recommendations to guidelines, primary literature, and outcomes data. Watch for deprescribing opportunities and pharmacogenomic considerations when relevant.
How to Display Pharmacotherapy Skills on Your Resume
2. Compounding
Compounding is the customized preparation of medications by mixing, altering, or combining ingredients to meet a patient’s unique needs as prescribed.
Why It's Important
Patients aren’t one-size-fits-all. Allergy-friendly formulations, special strengths, alternative dosage forms, flavoring for pediatric use—compounding fills crucial gaps in therapy.
How to Improve Compounding Skills
Follow current USP standards: Adhere to USP <795> (nonsterile), USP <797> (sterile), and USP <800> (hazardous drugs). Ensure policies reflect the latest revisions and enforcement timelines.
Hands-on practice and simulation: Repetition builds precision. Run mock scenarios, media fills, and beyond-use dating validations.
Robust quality systems: Document master formulas, verify calculations, calibrate equipment, and audit aseptic technique routinely.
Modern tools: Use compounding software, barcoding, and standardized workflows to reduce error risk and improve traceability.
Professional engagement: Connect with organizations such as the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding (formerly IACP) and state boards for guidance and advocacy.
How to Display Compounding Skills on Your Resume
3. Medication Therapy Management (MTM)
MTM is a structured service where pharmacists assess complete medication regimens—prescription, OTC, supplements—to identify problems, optimize therapy, and coach patients toward safer, more effective use.
Why It's Important
It boosts adherence, trims adverse events, cuts duplications, and often lowers total cost of care. Patients understand their therapy, clinicians get clarity, outcomes improve.
How to Improve Medication Therapy Management (MTM) Skills
Communication with purpose: Use teach-back, plain language, and culturally aware counseling to surface barriers and fix them.
Technology that helps: Document consistently, set reminders for follow-ups, and track interventions through MTM platforms or EHR workflows.
Keep sharpening: Pursue CE or certificate training focused on comprehensive medication reviews and targeted interventions.
Collaborative practice: Implement standing orders or collaborative practice agreements to resolve therapy issues in real time.
Measure and refine: Monitor adherence, gaps in therapy, and intervention acceptance. Use Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles to iterate.
How to Display Medication Therapy Management (MTM) Skills on Your Resume
4. Immunization Delivery
Immunization delivery includes screening, vaccine administration, documentation, storage and handling, and counseling to protect communities against vaccine-preventable disease.
Why It's Important
Pharmacists expand access. Faster coverage, fewer outbreaks, steadier public health—all from a trusted, convenient point of care.
How to Improve Immunization Delivery Skills
Master the fundamentals: Stay current on schedules, contraindications, spacing, and coadministration. Get and maintain immunization certification per state rules.
Cold chain excellence: Tight temperature control, continuous monitoring, and meticulous logs prevent potency loss.
Lower barriers: Offer walk-ins, extended hours, streamlined forms, and standing orders to speed throughput.
Use registries and reminders: Record doses in the state IIS, set reminders, and recall patients due or overdue.
Engage and educate: Address hesitancy with empathy and clear evidence. Partner with schools, employers, and community groups.
Audit for safety: Drill adverse event management, maintain emergency supplies, and conduct periodic practice reviews.
How to Display Immunization Delivery Skills on Your Resume
5. Patient Counseling
Patient counseling is a focused, individualized conversation about medication use—what to take, how to take it, what to watch, and when to seek help.
Why It's Important
Clear guidance prevents errors, boosts adherence, and turns confusion into confidence. That ripple effect can change outcomes.
How to Improve Patient Counseling Skills
Clarity over jargon: Translate complex topics into everyday language without diluting accuracy.
Active listening: Surface concerns, literacy barriers, financial stressors, and cultural context before advising.
Personalize relentlessly: Align dosing schedules with daily routines, anticipate side effects, and co-create action plans.
Use teach-back: Confirm understanding by having patients explain key points in their own words.
Close the loop: Offer follow-up touchpoints to troubleshoot adherence or new symptoms.
Keep learning: Refresh on high-risk meds, black box warnings, and new counseling points often.
How to Display Patient Counseling Skills on Your Resume
6. Pharmaceutical Calculations
Pharmaceutical calculations cover dosing, dilutions, compounding quantities, rate calculations, and conversions—precision math that underpins safe therapy.
Why It's Important
One slip can snowball into harm. Sound calculations safeguard dosing accuracy and product integrity.
How to Improve Pharmaceutical Calculations Skills
Own the basics: Ratios, proportions, dimensional analysis, SI units, and conversions—built-in muscle memory.
Practice daily: Work real-world cases, timed drills, and edge scenarios (pediatrics, renal dosing, narrow therapeutic index).
Double-check intelligently: Verify using a second method or independent calculator; document high-risk calculations.
Set guardrails: Define maximum single doses, concentration limits, and infusion parameters for high-alert meds.
Peer review: Discuss tricky problems with colleagues; share tips and mnemonics.
Refresh with CE: Take targeted courses that emphasize sterile compounding math and error prevention.
How to Display Pharmaceutical Calculations Skills on Your Resume
7. Drug Utilization Review (DUR)
DUR is the systematic review of medication use to ensure therapies are appropriate, safe, and effective—before dispensing, during therapy, and retrospectively.
Why It's Important
It catches the hidden hazards: interactions, duplications, dose mismatches, and contraindications. Patients stay safer; therapy stays on track.
How to Improve Drug Utilization Review (DUR) Skills
Stronger clinical decision support: Configure alerts for renal and hepatic adjustments, age-related risks, and high-alert drugs—then tune out the noise by reducing low-value alerts.
Policy and pathways: Standardize handling for common DUR flags (e.g., QT-prolonging combos, overlapping opioids, benzodiazepines).
Collaborate fast: Build quick communication loops with prescribers for dose changes, alternative therapy, or lab follow-up.
Talk to patients: Interviews expose nonadherence, OTCs, supplements, and side effects that data won’t reveal.
Use current guidance: Align with contemporary clinical guidelines and institutional formularies; reassess periodically.
Measure outcomes: Track intervention acceptance, prevented events, and trending problems to fuel quality improvement.
How to Display Drug Utilization Review (DUR) Skills on Your Resume
8. Pyxis MedStation
Pyxis MedStation is an automated dispensing cabinet that secures medications, controls access, and streamlines distribution across care areas.
Why It's Important
It strengthens medication safety, tightens inventory control, and speeds up administration where seconds count.
How to Improve Pyxis MedStation Skills
Barcode from the start: Ensure barcoding at receipt and during stocking to cut selection errors.
Keep the formulary clean: Remove discontinued items, standardize naming, and segregate look-alike/sound-alike drugs.
Right access for the right role: Role-based permissions, witness requirements for controlled substances, and time-limited overrides.
Tight EHR integration: Link to order verification and MAR documentation so dispensing and administration stay synchronized.
Relentless training: Onboard thoroughly, refresh often, and validate competency after upgrades.
Audit and act: Review discrepancies, overrides, waste, and usage trends; close gaps with targeted feedback.
How to Display Pyxis MedStation Skills on Your Resume
9. Rx30 Pharmacy System
Rx30 is a pharmacy management platform for community settings that handles prescription processing, workflow, e-prescribing, inventory, point-of-sale, and patient communications.
Why It's Important
It reduces manual friction, improves safety checks, and organizes daily operations so clinical work gets more of your time.
How to Improve Rx30 Pharmacy System Skills
Train deeply: Explore modules beyond the basics—claims edits, eCare plans, clinical alerts, and reporting.
Customize workflows: Tailor queues, user roles, alerts, and hotkeys to mirror how your team actually works.
Integrate smartly: Connect to EHR networks, adherence packaging, texting, and refill portals to shrink handoffs.
Automate the routine: Refill synchronization, reminders, prior authorization tracking—let the system do the heavy lifting.
Feedback loop: Capture staff input and share enhancement requests; keep SOPs aligned with new features.
Protect data: Enforce strong access controls, audit logs, and HIPAA-compliant settings.
How to Display Rx30 Pharmacy System Skills on Your Resume
10. Clinical Pharmacokinetics
Clinical pharmacokinetics examines how drugs move through the body—absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion—to individualize dosing and sharpen therapeutic drug monitoring.
Why It's Important
It turns population averages into patient-specific plans. Better target concentrations, fewer adverse effects, clearer interpretation of interactions and organ dysfunction.
How to Improve Clinical Pharmacokinetics Skills
Refresh core concepts: Half-life, clearance, volume of distribution, protein binding, and nonlinearity.
Use TDM programs: Apply Bayesian dosing tools or validated calculators for vancomycin, aminoglycosides, anticonvulsants, and beyond.
Case-based practice: Work scenarios that require changing parameters—obesity, pediatrics, renal replacement therapy, hepatic impairment.
Join rounds: Collaborate with physicians and nurses to time levels properly and adjust regimens quickly.
Document clearly: Record assumptions, calculations, and follow-up plans so others can reproduce your logic.
How to Display Clinical Pharmacokinetics Skills on Your Resume
11. Inventory Management
Inventory management covers forecasting, procurement, storage, expiry control, and reconciliation—keeping the right products available without waste.
Why It's Important
Stockouts delay care. Overstock bleeds cash. Tight control does both: protects patients and the bottom line.
How to Improve Inventory Management Skills
Digital oversight: Use pharmacy inventory systems for perpetual counts, reorder points, and real-time analytics.
Cycle counts, not surprises: Frequent audits catch discrepancies early; reconcile controlled substances meticulously.
Prioritize with data: Apply ABC or ABC-VED analysis to focus attention where cost and risk concentrate.
Expiry discipline: First-expiry, first-out. Track beyond-use dates and move soon-to-expire stock proactively.
Supplier strategy: Negotiate terms, diversify sources for critical meds, and plan contingencies for shortages.
Team training: Standardize receiving, labeling, storage conditions, and reverse distribution processes.
Loss prevention: Address shrinkage with secure storage, surveillance, and clear chain-of-custody steps.
How to Display Inventory Management Skills on Your Resume
12. Epic Willow
Epic Willow (Inpatient and Ambulatory) is Epic’s pharmacy module that connects order verification, dispensing workflows, inventory, and safety checks directly to the EHR.
Why It's Important
Orders, meds, labs, and documentation all flow together. Safer processes, fewer transcription risks, faster clinical interventions.
How to Improve Epic Willow Skills
Complete formal training: Take role-based courses and keep current with new releases.
Practice in playground: Use the training environment to rehearse complex workflows without touching live data.
Standardize builds: Create order sets, preference lists, and decision support that reflect institutional policies.
Network with super users: Share tips, troubleshoot issues, and align on best practices across departments.
Iterate after go-lives: Gather feedback post-upgrade, refine alerts, and adjust workflows for real-world efficiency.
How to Display Epic Willow Skills on Your Resume
