NRP Certified Jobs

Jobs that put you in the room when a baby is born. The 2025 neonatal guidelines say every birth should be attended by at least 1 person whose only responsibility is the care of the newborn, including the initial steps of resuscitation and giving ventilation when it's needed, and NRP is the program that trains for that. The AAP draws the audience for its shorter course wider still: anyone involved in the care of a newborn should take NRP Essentials, which reaches past the delivery room into the nursery and newborn intensive care.

Postings don't always say, and the 2 levels are different amounts of work. Essentials covers lessons 1 to 4 of the textbook, which run from preparing for a birth through the initial steps and ventilation. Advanced covers lessons 1 to 11 and, in the AAP's wording, may be appropriate for 2 groups: people who attend births and are responsible for the anticipated resuscitation of a newborn with known risk factors, and people who take part in resuscitation beyond assisted ventilation. Which level a posting means changes the course you book and the day it takes.

It comes in 2 parts, and you can buy them yourself on the AAP's learning platform if an employer isn't assigning them to you. Part 1 is self-paced study of the AAP textbook with an adaptive online assessment, and Part 2 is an instructor-led event with simulation and debriefing that has to happen within 90 days of finishing Part 1, though an instructor may allow up to a week beyond that for extenuating circumstances, and missing the window means re-enrolling in the curriculum and taking Part 1 again, at full price. Instructors schedule their own events and some are open only to a hospital's own staff, so that's the piece to line up first if you're doing this before you have the job. Provider status then lasts 2 years, and each hospital decides what happens if yours lapses.