How to Become a Travel Nurse
Most of you are here because you are interested in becoming a travel nurse or want to know more about it! Since Covid, travel nursing has become more popular, and there is a lot of information on it, which is amazing! I figured I’d share my personal journey because I know how overwhelming it can be to start something new. I started travel nursing back in 2018 before there was a lot of information on it. I remember being at my first job after about 4 years and feeling lost. I tried other avenues, like working at Pure Barre (my other passion being fitness), but I honestly wasn’t making enough money, and I needed something new. I knew I wanted to travel and do something exciting. I think I came across a post about a travel nurse at Lake Tahoe, and I said, “That’s what I want to do. I’m going to travel.” So, I started googling and figuring out how I was going to do this. I spoke to one agency that was local, and they said they had a travel job in Sharon, PA. I’m from Pittsburgh, and this was close to home. I decided that I would take a close one to make sure I was cut out for this. Long story short, I absolutely loved this job, and I loved the freedom of it! I would drive up for 3 days, stay the night, and make about double the money! I did this for 3 months, and then I took the leap and said, “I’m going to start applying for jobs in different states.” I applied to Hawaii, and after getting that job, I was hooked! Here are the basic steps on how to get started:
Step 1: Find a nearby nursing school or program.
Step 2: Get at least 1 year of nursing experience in your specialty, or I would personally recommend 2 years.
Step 3: Find nursing agencies (AYA, Trusted, Medical Solutions, etc) that have travel nurse jobs and browse the jobs based on areas you are interested in. For many of my travel nurse jobs, I used AYA because they were a very large company and had multiple jobs to offer.
Step 4: Fill out your resume on the site and start applying to jobs. At this point if you don’t have a Compact License you will also start applying to licenses in that state.
Step 5: Interview with the hiring manager and start the job. It is a very quick start time from interviewing in most cases. Sometimes I would interview, and they would ask if I could be there in one to two weeks. There are other various things you do at this point (onboarding, health physical, blood and drug tests, etc) but your recruiter will help you with this.
Other things to note: With travel nursing I was a person who loved change and have a very relaxed personality. I’m definitely Type B and can easily go with the flow and change doesn’t bother me much. Most cases in travel nursing you are the one getting floated and things usually don’t go according to plan. I can tell you that most of my assignments were pushed back due to something random. So if you are someone who likes structure and habit then it may not be for you. This may not always be the case but I like to give people a warning that are interested. It still has been one of my best decisions to this day and has led me to so many amazing opportunities!
