Identifying your travel nursing skill set

Being a travel nurse requires you to have a diverse and well-balanced skill set. Within any healthcare team, some nurses will excel in certain areas while some will shine in others. Like any good team, a nursing contingent is strongest when its members have complementary skills, so they can all contribute substantively to providing superlative care for their patients.

Having self-awareness about your own strengths and weaknesses will enable you to hone key skills so you are able to jump right in and enhance the team you are joining while on assignment. Read on for a few tips about how to develop several skills important to travel nursing jobs.

Social skills
One of the most important ways a travel nurse can contribute to his or her team is by having unimpeachable patient communication skills. Travel nurses are tasked with providing excellent care for their patients, and in the vast majority of cases this means interacting with patients and being able to foster a dialogue.

If you got into the field because you love working with people and have a history of putting them at ease or earning their trust, you might want to build around these interpersonal skills. According to NurseTogether, travel nurses who excel in patient communication are typically better able to care for patients and prevent important information from being lost in translation. 

There are many resources to help you improve your ability to communicate effectively with patients, and more experienced nurses are typically more than happy to help.

Technical savvy
If you noticed yourself particularly drawn to the more scientific aspects of your nursing education, you may find that honing your technical skills will help you most fully contribute to the team on your next assignment. 

How can you develop this particular set of skills? Keeping up with the journals and websites devoted to nursing practices and technologies is a great way to start. Furthermore, you might find that attending conferences or continuing your education even after you earn your degree can help you become an expert on the profession's best practices and newest trends.

Leadership
Once you become a more tenured nurse, you may find yourself with the opportunity to take on more leadership responsibilities. To truly excel on this path, you must be proficient in both of the areas listed above – communication skills and technical knowledge – but also combine them a strong sense of leadership and guidance.

Travel nurses who want to lead their teams, both by example and decree, should make sure they have a firm grasp of all of the major aspects of travel nursing. Talk to your supervisors regularly to learn about the particular demands of leading a healthcare team so that you will be in a good position when it comes time to take on more leadership responsibilities.