How to Become a Speech Therapist With These Resources

A Unique Collection of Resources You’ll Need To Become a Speech Therapist

If you’re interested in making a difference in the lives of people who have speech disorders, by helping them live a better and more satisfying life, then a career as a speech therapist — also referred to as a speech-language pathologist — could be a career choice for you.

You will need to go through a few years of schooling and on-the-job training before you can become fully certified and have the ability to work independently.

You may need to work from one location, or you could work at multiple locations when starting off. In a few years, when you are fully certified, you may open your own practice — but keep in mind even if you have your own practice, you will still need to visit schools and patients who have had a stroke and require in-hospital care.

As a speech therapist, your job duties may include some of the following tasks:

Working with children one-to-one or in a group for stuttering problems, learning disabilities, and voice disorders.
Conducting hearing test one-to-one.
Conducting school-wide hearing tests for early detection of problems.
Working with kids who have permanent hearing loss to learn sign language.
Working with special education teachers to plan teaching methods for students with speech and hearing problems.
Working with and educating parents on how to cope and help their children who have special needs.
Monitoring and enhancing speech theory programs.
Creating a progress report for children and patients you’re working with.
Working with stroke victims to enhance speech.
Working with children and adults to improve their voices.
Helping people to improve their vocabulary and sentence structure in their communications, whether it’s written or oral.
Working with people to improve their pitch.
Conducting exercises to develop and strengthen muscles used to swallow.
Plus more in the resources to follow.

This is a high-paying job; naturally, the area you work in, and demand in that area plays a factor in the salary you can receive. Statistics show that demand is growing. You’ll be able to find job statistics in the resources below for accurate numbers and trends.

You want to make sure that this is the right type of career for you before you invest thousands of dollars in your education and spend years of schooling, only to find you have made a career choice that isn’t a good fit.

Here are a couple of ideas that can help you with your career choice:

Go through as many resources as you can about the career. A good start is the resources included in this post. Next, visit universities that offer a complete education in the field.

In addition to your research, try to find a voice speech therapist or two who will allow you to shadow them in situations that aren’t confidential so that you’ll get a taste of what you can expect from this career. If that’s not possible, see if you can interview a speech therapist. With an interview, you can gain a lot of knowledge by preparing your questions beforehand.

By doing all the above work before committing to this career, you’ll have a good idea of what you’re getting into before you start your journey.

Have a look at the resources below that are organized in sections for your convenience.

Speech Therapy Resources

The Latest about Speech Therapy

In this section, you’ll find the latest information related to Speech Therapy, including the latest news, Google search results, videos, what people are tweeting, and more.