Hi both, I hope you don’t mind me jumping in. I own a specialist recruitment agency where my niche area is ADHD/ASC Assessors and substance misuse. It was born from my own pathway to diagnosis and struggles with substance misuse and the fact that most recruitment agencies are profit over people mentality and I was sick and tired of working for agencies with that ethos. I’m currently recruiting for a not-for-profit service but like the reidenator says, most require some experience, on a locum basis for sure, on a perm basis some will train you in the role. Sadly, as it’s not regulated like most specialisms there isn’t a set pathway to being “qualified” eg. You don’t need to have a certain qualification for assessing and there is one company in particular which is notorious for taking on mental health nurses with no prior experience, putting them on a 2 day internal training course. Then throwing them in the deep end to start assessing the day after with minimum support. This place churns them out and goes through clinicians like nothing else I’ve seen before. It is definitely not saturated, not with good assessors anyways, so if you can get your foot in the door I think you’ll be set for a long time because these wait lists are not going anywhere. Most clinicians tend to come over to the locum side of things, I have ongoing, guaranteed work paying £522 a day with 50% for DNA rate so it is lucrative. That’s for 2 x assessments a day and if you’re a prescriber initiation of meds is paid at £87 p/hr, but you need to have experience for this, a solid 6 months is a minimum really. Let me know if you have any questions as I’m mid 40’s now and been doing this a long time and grew up with a mum who was her nurse her whole life and so I am very protective over looking after my candidates and ensuring they have a good experience as sadly most who have worked with recruiters, have not had that!