Do you want to improve the field by creating great products for fellow speech pathologists? Demographic information on speech pathology and its professionals is crucial to helping you get there.
We share demographic information below that highlights how many speech-language pathologists (SLPs) there are, what the median income is and how many SLPs are working in particular settings. As an SLP, I find it interesting to see how I compare to the general field of speech-language pathology. Demographics can also be fun facts to throw out at the next social gathering.
Gender and Ethnicity
No surprise on the field’s gender breakdown or on our ethnicity as a whole. But how does this match the children that we serve? If you were working to improve the field, find out why things are not working, or identify what might be the greatest challenges of the field, considering how we are uniquely biased could provide the answer.
Speech Pathology Employment
One huge benefit to our profession is that it has a wide variety of settings to work in and we tend to be friendly to various working arrangements to accommodate families or changes in availability. Speech pathologists are needed in every arena. Do you have ideas on how to increase the number of professionals in our field? I am sure that ASHA would love to hear it.
SLP Place of Employment and Role
We tend to define SLPs by the place that we work. While 1/2 of all speech pathologists are in the schools, the other half are in a variety of settings. Equally so, 3/4 of us provide services but a healthy 25% are committed to research, leadership, and teaching. If you have ideas of reaching speech pathologists with ideas to help them, where do you see them working and what are they doing?
Geographic Information on Speech Pathology
Obviously there are speech pathologists throughout the United States. However, accessing them and knowing what is important to different groups is important. For example, trying to reach rural SLPs might be more easily accomplished through podcasts due to their frequent drive time. As another example, we speak frequently on Ethics because it is a mandated portion of the needed CEUs in Texas. When we tried to gauge interest throughout the U.S. it was much smaller because only one other state had this requirement.
Turn your Speech Ideas into Products and Move the Field Forward
If you would like a full demographic report or need CEUs, we presented at the Texas Speech-Language Hearing Conference on this topic and we have an online version of the course.
Speech-language pathologists frequently create and re-create materials to meet their clients’ needs. In this video course we showcase both successful speech product creations and failures to help SLPs turn their efforts and expertise into valuable products. We share ways to explore needs of the field, implement a project plan, and get your product to the market.
