6 Long-Term Benefits of Travel Nursing
By Anita Wong, contributor
While registered nurses are expected to enjoy a 12% growth in jobs between 2018 and 2028, a full-time, permanent position isn't your only nursing career option. Travel nursing offers exciting opportunities to explore new places while putting your professional skills to work. This flexible career provides immediate travel and flexibility, but the benefits of travel nursing also include long-term personal and professional growth. Here's why taking your nursing skills to another facility is an investment in your future.
1. Expanding your skill set and knowledge
Whether you accept an assignment in a busy trauma hospital or a smaller community hospital, working as a travel nurse means exposure to different environments, colleagues, patient populations and technologies. As you work through a variety of cases, you can compare best practices and learn new ways of doing things. This valuable experience helps you to grow professionally, providing a foundation of knowledge that carries you throughout your nursing career.
2. Improving your confidence and resilience
It's daunting to head into a new environment, but as you add more travel nurse assignments to your resume, you become more comfortable at adapting to different situations. Flexibility and resilience are highly desired skills, and consistently going into unfamiliar settings and performing your job to high standards demonstrates an ability to tackle challenges wherever you go.
3. Developing a career network
While you can build strong friendships during your travel assignments, you can also develop a professional network that benefits you for years to come. Depending on where you accept assignments, you could build mutually beneficial relationships across the country. Making professional connections also helps to increase your visibility. If you decide to return permanently to one location, you have the experience and contacts in place to help facilitate a move.
CHECK OUT more career advice from our travel nurse expert.
4. Saving for your future
A number of factors affect how much a travel nurse makes — such as qualifications, facility and location — but one of the key benefits of travel nursing is compensation. Travel nurses typically earn about 15% more than nurses employed in a full-time permanent position, particularly in locations and specialties that have an urgent demand for qualified professionals. Additional stipends for housing, meals and transportation, combined with possible overtime pay, can result in an attractive compensation package.
With a little planning, you can make your paycheck go further and tuck away funds for your future.
5. Exploring new places
Travel nursing is about bringing your patient care skills to where they're most needed, but it's also about discovering the world. Whether you want to be near a ski hill or beach, take in museums or Broadway shows or simply get to know a place you've never been, there's likely a travel nursing assignment for you.
In a permanent RN position, your travels can be limited by time, airfare and other expenses. A travel nurse that takes on temporary positions can visit several places a year and stay for long enough to feel at home in an area. This is one of the key benefits of travel nursing that not many people get to experience.
If you're not sure where you would like to travel, check out our list of best travel nursing locations to visit now.
6. Create lasting memories
Among the long-term benefits of travel nursing are the memories and life experiences that you create. The people that you meet, the places you visit, the experiences you open yourself up to and the friendships that you make enrich you as a person. These intangible benefits may be the most rewarding part of a travel nursing career.
The American Association of Colleges of Nursing notes that the shortage of registered nurses in the United States is expected to intensify. Hospitals continue to require experienced RNs to fill temporary assignments for a variety of reasons, as observed by Inquiry, making travel nursing an increasingly stable and fulfilling career.
If you're interested in starting your travel nursing adventures, find out how to become a travel nurse or explore current openings by location or specialty.