You’re moving on from your new graduate Speech Pathologist days and quickly becoming a more confident and competent therapist by the day. As you head into your early career years as a Speech Pathologist, we want to give you some pointers to help you make the most of the season you’re in.
Whether you’re in your second year of practice, your third, or your fourth, we want to showcase some of the best career advice for this time to help you on your way. To do this, we’ve asked some of our very own SpeechEase early career therapists and senior Speech Pathologist for the advice they’d give to those starting out clinically.
6 Early Career Tips for Australian Speech Pathologists
Focus On Building Your Soft Skills
It may still be early days, but we hope you’ve noticed over the last year or so that you know a lot more than you think you do. You’ve been prepared by university assessments, placements, and your new grad year for the “real world” of speech pathology – now it’s time to dig into that soft skill development.
Sure, you won’t get it perfect (ever – no one can!) but the more you practice things like explaining concepts to parents, having tough conversations about diagnoses and assessment results, and collaborating with stakeholders for optimal client outcomes… the better you’ll get at it.
Do Your Best To Leave Work At Work
One of the things you should try to make a priority in your early career as a speech pathologist is creating separation between ‘work’ and ‘home’. As tempting as it can be to stay an extra thirty minutes to finish something or take it home to work on while you eat dinner, you’ve got to set boundaries early to avoid burnout.
The health profession is no stranger to high levels of stress and burnout – don’t become another statistic, instead, get accountable with your fellow speech pathologists and commit to leaving work at work. And if you are working somewhere that encourages (or expects) unpaid overtime… get out of there! Here are some other tips to help you improve work life balance as a speech pathologist if you need them.
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help
If you find yourself with too much on your plate, or a tricky situation that you don’t know how to deal with on your own, don’t keep it to yourself! In your early career season get comfortable with asking for help – and it doesn’t have to be your direct manager. You can lean on your colleagues for mentorship and support. You can ask the admin team who’ve been at your clinic for years for their help finding or setting up certain things.
Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help! No one expects you to know everything.
Observe Other Speech Pathologists in Action
One of the joys of being an early career Speech Pathologist is still having SO much to learn. This field is ever-growing and evolving, with new techniques and new research informing our practice each year. Take the opportunity to observe other Speech Pathologists in sessions as much as possible. Ask questions to your more experienced colleagues to learn more about their areas of interest.
Observing in your early career days will also help you to get more exposure to behaviour management, redirection, different types of cues and differing approaches for different. All of this will help you to become a better Speech Pathologist!
The more you can learn at this point in your career, the more helpful you can be one day to the speechies who you’ll work alongside when you are a senior clinician!
Read Over Your University Materials With Fresh Eyes
It may seem funny at first but it’s amazing how much more you will be able to learn and absorb from your university content *after* you’ve graduated. Keep those textbooks and lecture notes handy – you never know when you might need to refer back to something. Revise concepts you’ve learned and put them into action – it’ll probably make a whole lot more sense now that you have more experience and real-world knowledge to back it up.
Don’t Re-Invent The Wheel
When you are fresh in your speech therapy career it can be tempting to spend hours designing and crafting unique and creative speech therapy resources. You’ll want to come up with awesome themed speech therapy sessions – and you so can – but you don’t need to reinvent the wheel!
No matter what therapy you’re offering or information you’re providing, chances are someone on Twinkl/TPT/another SP has already created it. Dedicating time to finding high quality resources for concepts that you’ll be touching on again and again pays dividends.
Become familiar with the resources the clinic already has and make sure they are filed in places where you’ll be able to find them again. That’s how you’ll succeed in your early career as a speech pathologist.
Did you find these early career tips for Australian Speech Pathologists helpful? We sure hope so! For more career insights and guidance from our team of passionate speechies, head over to our dedicated career blog.
