I’m hoping that this post will act as a helpful guide to some of the resources we’ve put out about travel nursing. We’ve created many more helpful posts not included in this timeline, be sure to check them out too! These posts listed below within the timeline will be useful for new prospective travel nurses, seasoned travel nurses looking to start working with a new agency, and anyone in between. A great first resource to start out with is our post on How to Become a Travel Nurse.

I’ll be adding to this post periodically as we put out more resources for travel nurses. Be sure to let me know in the comments what you’d like to see next!

1. choose an agency

Once you’ve decided to start travel nursing, assuming you have all of the required experience and licenses, your first step will be to choose an agency. We’ve written a couple of posts to help you make this choice and to give a bit of a picture of what the sign on process looks like when you start working with a travel nurse agency.

You can start this process at any time and get set up with an agency even if you aren’t necessarily planning to start travel nursing in the near future. You may need to repeat some of the onboarding if you don’t begin travel nursing within a year. If you’re hoping to start travel nursing ASAP, expect at least a few months of waiting from this point depending how efficient you can be with onboarding and how picky you’re planning to be when it comes to contracts. The level of experience you have will also factor in to how long it takes to get a contract offer.

• How to Pick a Travel Nursing Agency That’s Right For Your
• Signing On With a Travel Nurse Agency
• Travel Nursing with One Year of Experience

2. find a recruiter

This one goes hand in hand with finding an agency, because more than likely you’ll start talking with a recruiter who will help you decide if their agency is right for you. Keep in mind though, that you can always change recruiters while staying with the same agency. It’s uncomfortable, but there’s a reason that many people say finding the right recruiter is more important than finding the right agency (although we’re not sure we totally agree with that).

• Three Things to Look For In a Travel Nurse Recruiter

3. do your onboarding

Once you have a recruiter and have decided on an agency (or agencies) to work with, you’ll need to begin the onboarding process with the agency. This part is pretty intensive, but in general should be less time-consuming than the onboarding process of accepting and preparing to begin an actual contract. Depending how efficient you are with all of this, it could take as little as a couple of weeks. Once you’re all on-boarded your agent will start submitting you to contracts!

• Signing On With a Travel Nurse Agency

4. decide what you want

Now that you’re ready to go, your agent will want to ideally start submitting you to contracts right away. This means that you’ll probably want to start thinking of what you want in a contract even before you get to this point, but now it’s time to make some decisions. Are you willing to work nights or do you only want to consider day contracts? What states and cities are you interested in going to for a contract? What units are you interested in working on (assuming your experience qualifies you for more than one)?

5. sort through contracts

After you have all of those conversations with your agent, they’ll start sending you contracts that match most if not all of your preferences. In all likelihood, you’ll sort through dozens of contracts and have your agent apply you to many of them, and then it’s just a waiting game until you get an offer. The idea of deciding on your preferences and then each individual contract that you get submitted to, is that once an offer comes in you’re already ready to accept it.

Once you get to this point, it could be days or it could be weeks before you lock in a contract. Like I said before, this depends on what’s out there as well as how picky you are and how much experience you have (how attractive of a candidate/hire that you are).

IMPORTANT: Hospitals typically do not list positions/contracts for more than a month out. This means that you likely won’t be able to start applying to contracts until a month or so before you’re ready to get on the road and start working. This is unfortunate when it comes to things like all of the onboarding work you have to do and finding housing, but it’s just the name of the game.

• Deciding What You Want in a Travel Nurse Contract

6. apply, wait, negotiate

There’s no requirement that you accept an offer automatically, no questions asked once it comes in, although some agents will try to tell you that there is. You should not be penalized for rejecting an offer and from what we’ve heard and experienced, it seems to be most often a fear-mongering tactic on the part of the travel nurse agent/recruiter to get you to accept a contract quickly. This means they get paid sooner too, so unfortunately they can sometimes try to push you to accept a contract that might not be best for you or that you just don’t want.

Our advice is to hold out for a contract that you’re excited about, but not without reflecting on your preferences and experience to get a realistic idea of what kind of contract you’ll be able to get. Check out the resources below which will help you to make the decision of whether or not to accept a certain contract.

• What to Do Before Accepting a Travel Nurse Contract
• Negotiating Travel Nurse Contracts
• Questions to Ask During Your Travel Nurse Contract Interview

7. start onboarding

Yay! You’ve accepted a contract! Congratulations and welcome to the game! Your contract probably starts sometime within the next 3-6 weeks!

Now the hard part begins… The onboarding process for each contract, each agency, each hospital is different, but we’re planning on writing some guides that will give you a general idea of what this process looks like. You’ll have many online modules to complete, drug and fit tests, and possibly other doctors appointments to make sure you’re up to date on everything. Depending on whether you’re going to have to use a new-to-you documentation system or not, you’ll have even more online training to do.

8. find housing

As you go through the onboarding process, you’ll also want to immediately jump into finding housing. We have made a few resources already to help with this part of the process and will probably put out a few more! Finding furnished housing at the last minute is TOUGH and can be very time-consuming, but don’t worry too much; you’ll find something! There have been multiple times that we’ve signed a lease within two weeks of moving in which, yes, is super nerve-wracking when you’re getting down to the wire and need housing, but that’s just part of travel nursing.

• Travel Nurse Housing
• How to Find Housing While Travel Nursing
• How to Avoid Housing Scams
• How to Find Housing Travel Nursing With Pets

9. get there – it’s time for a road trip!

Hopefully you’ll have found housing before you set off on a road trip to get wherever you’re going so you can just focus on getting there in one piece! We’ve written out our advice for road trips (and road trips with cats – we have two) as well as what to pack when you’re travel nursing. We have a tiny little Ford Fiesta hatchback that we stuff my husband and I, our two cats, and all of our things into while we’re on the road travel nursing. It’s tight, but it’s possible!

• Travel Nursing Essentials
• Preparing For a Cross-Country Road Trip part one
• Preparing For a Cross-Country Road Trip part two
• Road Trip Tips
• Cats on the Road

10. begin your contract

Once you get to wherever your contract is, it’s time to make sure everything’s in order (do you have the right colour scrubs?) and begin your contract! Your first week will be orientation with some short days of signing paperwork and touring the facility, but you should have to opportunity to get full-time hours even your first week. Unfortunately, from our experience it seems pretty common to not get your schedule more than a couple days in advance for this week. One of Dan’s contracts actually just told him one day at a time what his schedule would be the next day…that was super fun.

We’ll be putting out tons more resources for this section, but so far we’ve covered what working nights as a travel nurse is like. We did this from the perspective of both the travel nurse (my husband, Dan) and the significant other/wife of the travel nurse (me, Emma).

• What to Expect Your First Day as a Travel Nurse
• Working Nights part one
• Working Nights part two
• Travel Nursing Med/Surg

11. decide what comes next

About a month or a month and a half into your contract, you’ll most likely get the opportunity to extend your contract. This can be for another full 13 weeks (the length of most travel nursing contracts), or sometimes you can extend just for another few weeks if you’d like. So far, we have never extended and have always started a new contract within a month of Dan finishing his last one, but for stability’s sake, extending is a great option too. If you decide not to extend, start working with your agent to find your next contract!

• What to Do in Between Travel Nurse Contracts

how long after starting the process to become a travel nurse did you start your first contract?