The benefits of travel nursing vary depending on the person. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide what you want to get out of your travel nursing career.
To help guide you, we’re going to help you nail down what perks you want most in your travel nurse career. In order to effectively communicate with your recruiter, it’s important to know what is most important to you!
Remember that handy list on why you want to travel from Step #1? Let’s turn that page over and make another list. Brainstorm your personal wants and needs. Don’t worry about making it perfect right now. Just jot down everything you can think of that you could want or need out of travel nursing!
What You Can Get Out of Travel Nursing
When looking at your personal desires and considering what you can get out of travel nursing, it’s important to decipher between a need and a want. Needs are more pressing, while your wants should be items that feel more flexible to you.
Examples of Wants:
- 12 or 8-hour shifts
- Teaching facility versus non-teaching
- Small or large hospitals
- Location
- Overtime availability
- 100% guaranteed hours (Many people think every travel nursing contract has guaranteed hours–but a lot have some level of a call off policy)
- Types of housing available
Examples of Needs:
- Salary
- Shift
- Time off during your contract for non-negotiable events (weddings, baby showers, etc.)
- Health insurance
- Start date
As you can see, some of these items could go on either list. So, how do you determine what benefits you really need to glean from travel nursing?
You will have to weigh the pros and cons.
Let’s walk through some example scenarios:
You might want to start on September 1st but need to be finished with a contract by a certain date due to a family event in a different state than the contract.
You might want to be in California but most importantly need to be somewhere on the West Coast because your daughter is expecting her first baby.
Now that you have a brainstorm list go back through it and highlight items that are true NEEDS. This list can also change over time! When you are ready, you can return to the introduction or move forward or back using the article links below.
