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28 Speak Out February 2017
Association news
The Early Career Reference Group is a team made up
of 11 early career speech pathologists as well as team members
from Speech Pathology Australia. This group is working together
to develop resources to guide and support early career clinicians.
We recently received an email from Dasha Kolesik at Say Hooray
Speech Pathology that posed the question:
“How could a small private practice owner/manager best support
an early career SP? There are resources that I’ve utilised from the
SPA website but I’d love to hear from direct input from some SPs.
If by any means this isn’t possible, I completely understand, but
otherwise it would be insightful to see the response.” Dasha
Kolesik at Say Hooray Speech Pathology.
Our email response to this was as follows:
“What a wonderful email to receive! It is useful to both new
graduate clinicians and their employers to understand resources
and strategies to best support early career employees.
“From your email we can see that you have accessed Speech
Pathology Australia’s Early Career Support page that provides
resources for speech pathology students and early career
employees.
“Your question was posed to the Early Career Reference Group,
which is made up of 11 early career speech pathologists and the
following ideas were suggested:
• Having a meeting between employer and early career
SP to understand the expectations and entitlements of
the role including caseload, supervision and professional
development. This should be reviewed regularly to
encompass changing expectations.
• Regular supervision for the early career SP that allows
the SP to develop goals for learning and strategies to
achieve the goals. This supervision should be guided
by the SP and can involve individual supervision or a
combination of individual, group and peer supervision.
“Supervision should guide the early career SP in professional
development opportunities based on caseload and personal
needs and requirements. For example, if the early career SP
feels he/she needs to develop stuttering skills for the preschool
population, the Lidcombe Program course would be useful for
skill development.
“The Early Career Member Community on Facebook will be used
to disseminate information and provide discussion regarding
issues relating to Early Career Speech Pathologists.
“Thank you for getting in contact with our team and we hope to
regularly include information in Speak Out regarding the resources
we are developing for employers and early career speech
pathologists.”
If you would like to pose a question to the Early Career Reference
Group, please join the Early Career Member Community on
Facebook.
Early Career Reference Group
Resources for early career clinicians in private practice
Go to members
early career support.