Speak Out draft text june 2016

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. 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 Three years on from this time and I still remember being nervous about all the new roles I was

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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

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June 2016 www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au

Speak Out