Is it hard to get an assignment if you haven’t worked for awhile?

Depends, right? Would you hire such a traveler as yourself? For you to have a chance, your profile will have to be presented to the hiring manager. Couple of roadblocks. Vendor managers (basically outsourced HR) will screen profiles submitted by agencies and paper pushers may rule you out for consideration based on a lack of recent experience. Even hospitals that don't outsource HR may not give your profile to the manager for the same reason. And managers with self esteem issues could be intimidated by your profile and not consider you. Such is life! But if you don't try, that is by far the biggest roadblock.

I'd hire you! Suggest you call up a dozen or so agencies and pick the most promising five and fill out their paperwork. Get your licenses and certifications up to date and vaccinations/titers.

I was out of official Nursing for 8 years caring for parents. I was really scared of never being able to return to Nursing without taking one of those expensive RN refresher programs. Yet I had been maintaining my licenses and doing a lot of continuing ed.

So set out to edit and re-edit and re-edit my resume describing in to the point what I did Care giver, Case Manager, Advocate, Researcher etc etc.

It was basically the hardest Nursing I've done in my life 24-7 live-in. I have my elevator speech plus I reconnected with past references and updated info and I had years of experience in my specialty Psych and caring for my Parents was basically Geri-Psych with lots of Med Surg which I had no prior experience in so I gained many skills and became even more efficient balancing lots of roles but despite all that I would get from well meaning advisors you'd be lucky if you could get a Perm Job and then you would need to work their a year but not me. I wanted my cake and eat it too. I wanted to return as a Traveler as I had done before.

Finally I set out to email every company with ready rebuttals to any objection that I could simply and copy and paste on the fly and send plus I called and spoke with recruiters hoping that approach would work.

I guessed all I needed was one company to agree and one hospital to agree and I would keep renewing at the hospital for almost a year.

BAM! It worked! It was merely a numbers game. Out of all the companies I emailed maybe 60 responded and what I found in my real life experiment was after a few back and forth emails and them checking with their clinical director more than half of those responded favorably...some more so than others. In fact I had to create separate folders in Outlook to keep up with them. I focused on the ones that the recruiter had the most positivity and the company was large enough with plenty of assignments cause even then I still had the hurdle of getting a hiring manager to hire me and again I thought all I need is one. I had some interviews where I was turned down but I kept pushing. All I needed was one hiring manager who took care of their parents and would get it or knew somebody that did and understood the difficulty of it. Looking back on the process I learned some things I may have done differently but all in all it was just a matter of persistence, staying organized, genuine marketing. Finally a place that need nurses bad interviewed me and loved my background and in the 20 minute interview we mostly talked about the weather and it was a go. After I had hung up my mouth was open in amazement on how easy it was. I worked their a almost a year and I keep getting offers almost daily from companies but I like my recruiter. In the past I use to hop from one company to the other but I fine here for the time being.

So what I learned take the conventional advice with a grain of salt and caution but test it out and be persistent and committed. I am just happier as a Traveler plus I banked a lot of money that year. I am now a Thousandaire and taking a break and will out again soon. On the unit I worked it was just matter learning their systems but my Psych skills were there still and even sharper plus the fact that I don't consider this a job but a calling. I care about these people. I love connecting with them. I had to get back to them. Every place has it's hassles and I hadn't given injection in a long while but had given thousands before. I dealt with it all using humor, taking notes I called recipes for this process or that process.

So no you don't need a year of recent experience in a hospital setting.

Now if I had been doing something completely different it may have been more challenging but so many people even so called experts tend to go by this what I call copy and paste advise. Someone who sounds authoritative or even with some expertise tells them something and they take it as gospel unchecked. I didn't find a whole lot on the web about this except some posts saying you couldn't use caring for a family members as experience....says who? I did listen to a TED speech online about the subject that motivated me with real stories. Also I am close to 60 years old. I read the stats of the difficulty of returning to the work force and bought into that I would have given up. You have to say and believe you are an outlier of the stats. Plus despite of somewhat disabled...I can't run I did it. I keep in very good shape and future surgery will fix that problem. All these challenges I had (I won't get into all of them) have become a blessing to change for the better and re-invent myself it literally has turned the clock back for me except for white hairs here and there I am proud of in fact I try to brighten them ha ha :)

Just be creative with plans and do it and readjust and keep doing it.

If I change one I hope more peoples mind about this non-official rule of one year recent experience.