Oregon retired the CNA 2 designation on July 1, 2025 and now has one level of CNA. Most of the skills that used to define the second level became duties an employer's registered nurse teaches and signs off, one at a time.

Median Healthcare Salaryin Oregon

10%$17.55/hr

median$41.85/hr

90%$180.25/hr

Top Median Salary by Rolein Oregon

Physician$131.97/hr
Pharmacist$65.00/hr
Nurse Practitioner$61.48/hr
Pharmacy Intern$25.25/hr
Pharmacy Technician$21.40/hr

Top Open Rolesin Oregon

One duty at a time, at one employer

Every Oregon CNA carries the same baseline duty list. Above it sits a menu in rule 851-063-0035, and a duty comes off that menu when a registered nurse representing the employment site teaches it and validates that this CNA can do it. Only then may the nurses there assign it. The technical group of the menu runs to 20 duties, and 3 others open on an outside certificate: phlebotomy, a child safety seat check, telemetry. None of it travels, so a CNA taught and validated at one employer goes through both steps again at the next.

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Healthcare jobs in Oregon by city

Portland, OR37 jobs

Your questions about healthcare jobs in Oregon, answered

What does an Oregon posting mean when it asks for a CNA 2?: It's asking about skills, because the designation behind the phrase ended on July 1, 2025. Anyone who held it now shows up on the board's license verification portal as a CNA, and most of what defined the second level became duties an employer's RN can validate. The question such a posting really raises is which duties this employer teaches and validates, and whether they'll do it for a new hire, which is worth asking about anything on the Oregon nursing assistant page.
What can any Oregon CNA do without employer sign-off?: The baseline rule holds 9 duty groups, running from collaboration with the health care team through end-of-life care, and its technical group has 18 items. Among them: temperature, pulse, respiration and blood pressure by hand or machine, a forearm or orthostatic blood pressure, pulse oximetry, a fingerstick glucose test, oxygen therapy at a prescribed rate, CPAP and BiPAP devices, anti-embolism stockings, specimen collection and emptying drainage devices. One line in the standards rule governs all of it: a CNA may not work independently.
What does it take to become a medication aide in Oregon?: It takes a CNA certificate with 6 months behind it, twice over. The aide program has to be at least 6 months in the past, and the applicant needs at least 6 months of full-time aide experience, or the part-time equivalent, since finishing it. The medication aide program itself is a set of floors: at least 80 hours in total, at least 45 of them didactic, at least 11 in the lab and at least 24 clinical, with one clinical teaching associate to one student for the first 24 hours of that clinical experience. The certificate then covers 10 routes of administration and closes off 12, intramuscular, subcutaneous, intravenous and intradermal among them.