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June 2016 Speak Out 43
Graduates Benefit
from the SPA
Mentoring Program
Transitioning from student speech
pathologist to new graduate speech pathologist can
be a daunting process. Your first job brings about
much excitement but also many new challenges.
Three years on from this time and I still remember
being nervous about all the new roles I was
undertaking when I first entered our profession, such
as caseload management, accessing appropriate
professional development as well as making job and
career decisions. For this reason I decided to access
the mentoring program through speech pathology
Australia. I had started working as a Speech
Pathologist in a community health centre and was
obtaining clinical supervision at my workplace but
felt obtaining a mentor would further help me with
this transition from student to new graduate.
Through signing up for the program I was contacted
by my mentor Corina who had also been paired with
another new graduate. Hannah had also started her
first job as a speech pathologist working for a not-
for-profit association providing services for children
with disabilities. We therefore decided to all meet
together and undertake a more group-like mentoring
style.
Meeting in this style definitely took away some of
nerves of meeting our amazing mentor for the first
time. We met for lunch and discussed our new
graduate positions focussing on areas where we
needed extra guidance.
Corina was able to share her amazing wisdom and
knowledge to support each of us with our individual
questions and needs; and through listening to the
questions being asked and advice provided, Hannah
and I were able to learn from the experiences of
each other. It didn’t take long for all of us to see the
benefit of this meeting approach.
We all worked in paediatric services however our
caseloads differed and we each provided different
types of service delivery. This allowed us to learn
from the practices of each other. We started
meeting every couple of months over lunch on a
Saturday where Hannah and I would bring questions
focussing on a range of topics such as funding
options, deciding an area of interest, other services
available for children in WA etc. Even when we didn’t
have specific questions, being able to hear what we
had all been doing as speech pathologists would
start insightful discussions which greatly facilitated
our learning. We would contact our mentor via email
between meetings if we had more specific questions
or required further advice/information. We also used
emails to organise our next meetings.
Once our year of mentoring was officially over,
Hannah and myself were extremely grateful for the
insight and knowledge we had gained from our
mentor and even more grateful when she asked us
if we would still like to continue meeting in a more
informal capacity.
Over three years on from our initial meeting
and we are still catching up for lunch every few
months. We find it really valuable to engage in this
mentoring approach as it provides an opportunity
to hear outside points of view and also to open
up new perspectives to challenges we might be
facing in our roles. It has increased our networks
within our profession and keeps us all updated on
service delivery changes and issues facing speech
pathologists in different areas.
Corina has also been provided another mentee
who we are hoping will join our lunch catch ups so
that we can also learn from her experiences and
hopefully she too can gain some knowledge, insight
and advice from our unique mentoring.
By Lucy FitzSimons
Western
Australia
WA 804
Members
as at April 2016