4 Tips on How to Succeed in Your Speech Therapy (SLPA) Career
*How to Advance your SLPA career*
As wonderful as a SLPA career is, there is little to no opportunity to advance and grow your career. In order to be able to grow and make greater impact, you need to first be employed with a company that offers you the growth opportunity. I have gathered information (mostly based on experience), but here are a few tips that will make you advance your SLPA career and succeed in the field of speech therapy.
Speech Therapy Tip #1: Clinical experience
This is very straight forward, but experience is the key. This comes back to the environment you are working at. Working at a great place with lots of mentorship, guidance, and support can be a great way to jumpstart your SLPA job advancement. Find a company that gives to the chance to shadow experts in the field, teaches you how to write soap notes and reports, how to communicate with parents, and how to grow in the field.
Learning everything the correct way in the beginning will end up saving you lots of time and energy.
Speech Therapy Tip #2: Customer service Skills
When we hear customer service, we immediately think of retails or sales, however, customer service is crucial for a SLPA career. You are dealing with either kids or adults, parents, guardians, family members and etc. Having the right customer service skills will take you far in your career. Speech language pathology assistants spend lots of time communicating with patients and their families.
Relationship building is the key to a successful speech therapy. You need to build a strong relationship not just with your patient, but with the patient’s family as well. Learning about customer service and how you can build a strong lifelong relationship with your patients and how to make them satisfied with your service is a MUST in speech therapy. You want to deliver the best therapy and customer service for your patient. After all, you want to be much better and more successful than before, so you need to learn and do more.
Speech Therapy Tip #3: Teamwork
Work is more fun if you are part of a team. A sense of belonging to the company, clinic, coworkers, and the job is very important for a long-term job satisfaction. Also, SLPA jobs do require lots of communication, teamwork, and team effort to be done successfully. You need the support and guidance of your supervisor, coworkers, and your team in general because every day, and every patient is different.
Your experiences can be helpful to other speech therapists and their experiences can be helpful to you. Knowing how to be part of a team and have an affective teamwork strategy is important in this job. It might not seem important, but it is a significant step if you want to advance your Speech pathology career.
Speech Therapy Tip #4: Develop leadership skills
Contrary to some people’s beliefs, you don’t have to be born a natural leader. Leadership skills can be learned through out time. The formula is
Passion + knowledge +willingness to guide others = Leader
You should first have a passion for what you are doing, which in this case is speech language pathology or speech therapy. You should have enough knowledge and expertise in the field to be able to lead others. You must also have the willingness to guide others and teach them what you know. Leadership is about developing yourself as well as developing others. If you advance in the field of speech language pathology, then you can be a leader to develop and guide others into becoming a leader.
Leadership training is essential if you want to be more than just a SLPA in the field. Leadership opportunities give you the chance to create an impact on other SLPAs so they can create an impact on patient’s lives. Leadership skills will empower you to put your thoughts and ideas into actions. As a leader, it is also important to have a supportive team to help you bring your vision to life.
As a leader, you can have so much power in influencing your team and others to do so much more than they think they are capable of doing. After all, all our Speech language pathology assistant’s goals are to help patients gain the communication and verbal skills they need to succeed in life. That doesn’t mean they cannot go above and beyond in helping these patients. If you become a leader, you have the power to teach and influence them!
You might be asking, what is a leadership training. Let me tell you. In the leadership training, you can learn:
- to be a better leader than you already are
- learn strategies and tactics on how to influence your team
- get the inspiration you need to grow and do more
- learn how you can guide and develop others
- learn your leadership style
- learn how to make the process of teaching and developing enjoyable both for you and your team
- much more . . .Of course, these are just the basics of what you will learn in the leadership trainings. There is so much to learn that it will take this whole blog if I want to explain
Now what?
You might be wondering that this information is great, but where and how to start?
I can help you with that as well.
You need to do your own research and find list of companies that offer these types of trainings. Speech Improvement Center offers all these trainings, including customer service and teamwork, all with no cost. If you are interested in advancing your SLPA career and becoming a leader in the field, you might want to give them (aka us) a call at 818.206.4547 ?
Q: What trainings we have and how you can be part of the trainings?
A: Once you become a speech language pathology assistant with Speech Improvement Center, you can benefit from our trainings that are all free to attend, and even better, you get paid to attend the trainings.
- When you come on board with us, on your thirtieth day with the company, you will go through our customer service training. (Benefits explained on tip #2).
- On your ninetieth day with the company, you will go through our teamwork training. (Benefits explained on Tip #3)
- Once you complete your six months with the company, you can choose to attend our leadership trainings. We have 4 classes for leadership training, called Fast Track I, II, III, IV.
To learn more about SLPA job opportunities and the types of trainings we have, you might want to visit the website. You can apply here so one of our recruiters can contact you as soon as possible:
Employment Opportunities – Speech Improvement Center
If you want to know more about how to get your SLPA license in California, please visit:
How to become a Licensed SLPA in California – Speech Improvement Center
If you want to learn more about our trainings, please visit:
