How To Become A Graduate Clinician: What It Is and Career Path

What is a graduate clinician and how to become one

Updated January 8, 2025

4 min read

Graduate clinicians are recent graduates in the speech-language pathology field. They communicate ideas and information clearly and efficiently. They perform skilled services for different age ranges in an inpatient senior care facility and outpatient clinic, earning a cool average sum of $73,000 annually or $35 per hour.

Graduate clinicians provide assessment and intervention services for students with fluency disorders and cognitive-linguistic deficits. They develop treatment goals and objectives and planned interventions to achieve treatment plan goals. They also collaborate with clients on setting obtainable weekly objectives outside of the clinic setting.

Graduate clinicians are compassionate toward their patients and have top-notch analytical and critical-thinking skills. They typically hold a bachelor's or master's degree and have garnered experience from working as research assistants or as a volunteer or graduate assistants. They usually find jobs in the education and health care sectors and are sometimes expected to work at night or on weekends.

ScoreGraduate ClinicianUS Average

Salary

4.8

Avg. Salary $61,509

Avg. Salary $59,228

Stability level

8.4

Growth rate 21%

Growth rate 0.3%

Diversity

4.5

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 0.38%

Asian 3.23%

Black or African American 11.28%

Hispanic or Latino 12.21%

Unknown 5.91%

White 67.00%

Gender

female 91.39%

male 8.61%

Age - 39

Race

American Indian and Alaska Native 3.00%

Asian 7.00%

Black or African American 14.00%

Hispanic or Latino 19.00%

White 57.00%

Gender

female 47.00%

male 53.00%

Age - 39

Stress level

8.4

Stress level is high

7.1 - high

Complexity level

9.9

Complexity level is advanced

7 - challenging

Work life balance

7.8

Work life balance is good

6.4 - fair

Key steps to become a graduate clinician

Explore graduate clinician education requirements

Most common graduate clinician degrees

Bachelor's

79.4 %

Master's

18.5 %

Associate

1.2 %

Start to develop specific graduate clinician skills

Skills	Percentages
Motor Speech Disorders	15.63%
Patients	11.26%
Autism	9.77%
Dysphagia	6.69%
Group Therapy Sessions	3.94%

Complete relevant graduate clinician training and internships

Accountants spend an average of Less than 1 month on post-employment, on-the-job training. New graduate clinicians learn the skills and techniques required for their job and employer during this time. The chart below shows how long it takes to gain competency as a graduate clinician based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data and data from real graduate clinician resumes.

Research graduate clinician duties and responsibilities

Learned different therapeutic techniques by working with individuals with communication disorders including: receptive and expressive language disorders and aphasia.
Provide assessment and intervention for adults with a variety of developmental disorders, acquire communication disorders, and dysphagia.
Plan activities for expressive language disorders, articulation, phonological processes, literacy, phonological awareness, fluency, and autism.
Serve individuals with aphasia by administering assessments that addressed cognitive/language deficits and providing language therapy in both individual and group settings.

Prepare your graduate clinician resume

When your background is strong enough, you can start writing your graduate clinician resume.

You can use Zippia's AI resume builder to make the resume writing process easier while also making sure that you include key information that hiring managers expect to see on a graduate clinician resume. You'll find resume tips and examples of skills, responsibilities, and summaries, all provided by Zippi, your career sidekick.

Choose from 10+ customizable graduate clinician resume templates

Build a professional graduate clinician resume in minutes. Browse through our resume examples to identify the best way to word your resume. Then choose from 10+ resume templates to create your graduate clinician resume.