My name is Shane Garner. I’m the Associate Director of Nursing for Travel Nurses, Inc. and OR Nurses nationwide. I am a registered nurse, along with the other clinicians in our company composed of our clinical team.
My biggest tip working in both areas would be to make sure and sell yourself. Make sure from an administrator or from a director standpoint when they’re reviewing your resume, are looking at your packet to decide if they want to offer you a job at that facility. You need to sell yourself. And the resume is the best way to do that.
So I can’t stress enough how important it is to have a good resumé that’s easy to read, meaning it’s in chronological order. It has where you’ve worked the position you held, and the dates you held. Coming from both the recruitment side and now working as one of the directors of nursing, you really need to be clear with that.
They’re looking at many resumes if they get to your resume and it’s harder to read or they don’t understand. Guess what? They’re taking it and they’re moving to the next one. So my biggest advice would be the resume. And secondly, you know, coming from nurse leadership, now, we work really in a support role for our clinicians that are out in the field because everyone knows things happen.
Things arise in nursing where you may need to speak to someone. We’re always available 24 hours. We have a 24-hour clinical team, always on staff that’s able to speak with you, whether you work days, nights, or mids. And we really pride ourselves on having a clinician-based clinical team that can answer questions and helps out when needed.
Another good question. I wish I would have known earlier that nursing was what I wanted to do. 
Nursing came as a second career for me. I didn’t start nursing until later in life. I was in my late thirties when I started nursing school, actually, so I wish I would have known earlier how much I was going to enjoy it and all the people that I was going to meet.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard. Nursing is hard, especially now with COVID. Um just trying to figure out staffing levels for facilities and you know, it’s caused a lot of hardship with nurses. And once again, that’s why we are there in the support role to help those clinicians when they’re out in the field. From both the recruiter side, we have awesome recruiters that nurses and our techs can talk to and talk through things.
And then the safety net is us as the clinical team who’s also been out there in the field and we know what you’re going through. I couldn’t be more thrilled to be a nurse.
Yeah, it wasn’t the TV shows, because it’s nothing like the TV shows. I just always enjoyed either if I was going with someone, just everything, all the pieces of puzzles to have to fit together in the E.R. And you 
really are it’s kind of cliche in nursing, but you hear it a lot. You’re really seeing these people at the worst times of their life, and knowing that you’re helping them at that moment when they first see you in the E.R., it’s a gratifying experience.
So I really enjoyed working in the E.R. and it is tough it’s one of the tough specialties to work in. Especially working in trauma or at level one, even level two facilities. So it’s tough. It definitely takes a special nurse to work in the E.R. as it does, every specialty has different sets of personalities that work best.
You know, there’s the O.R. nurse. You have an ICU nurse. Not everybody can work in those different specialties, so you have to find what is best for you and your niche. Don’t be stuck in something that you’re not enjoying. If it’s a specialty, try to transition to something else.
My present to myself when I graduated nursing school was an African safari. So, in Africa, I went with my partner and I and we just did. We were there for three weeks. It was amazing. It’s one of the best I would say it is the best trip I’ve ever taken.
The second would be Vietnam. I loved going to Vietnam and Thailand and Cambodia. If you really want to just relax and you know, turn your phone off for two or three weeks if you have the time to do it. It’s another great country, and the people were wonderful. And I just recently came back from Iceland. So I’m trying trying to hit every continent that there is within my lifetime.
So it’s the number one thing I enjoy doing. It’s what keeps me satisfied in life. And traveling is definitely it. Do you have tips for a nurse looking to travel on vacation? I do have travel tips as a traveler. When you’re in between contracts and you have time to take a vacation, take those vacations because you never know what may happen.
So this is a great story. Britney, this is when I was recruiting,
Every time we would get her job offers, she would be in a different country, worried that she wasn’t going to get cell phone coverage to take the call from the manager that was calling to interview. One of the trips she went on she actually I believe was in Ireland, she actually got a job offer while she was in Ireland.
And she met her husband. She is an ER nurse working in Texas right now. And that would be my travel tip. Take those vacations, because you never know what, who or what may happen.
