You help people overcome challenges: Wanna Become A Speech Therapist?

What do speech therapists typically do? What conditions and disorders do speech therapists in India deal with? Is there any new area where their intervention is useful?
Speech therapists’ work is three-fold. First, they help to develop speech and language in children who for various reasons fail to develop normal speech and language, as in those with hearing impairment, intellectual disability, and autism or cerebral palsy. Secondly, speech therapists help to improve communication for children and adults by helping them to have age and gender appropriate voice, articulation and rhythm in their speech which is disturbed due to faulty learning or some pathological defects in the speech organs. Thirdly, they help adults and the elderly to acquire different modes of communication which is lost due to medical problems like strokes, surgical removal of larynx due to cancer, accidents or neurological disorders disturbing voice, articulation and prosody in speech.

Recently speech therapists have become actively involved in voice and speech recognition which finds a number of applications in forensic science. A speech-language pathologist may play an important role in the prevention of communication disorders by interacting with young parents, children and adults in the community.

At what stage is this profession in India? Is its reach still limited to large hospitals/organisations in the country? What are the employment prospects of speech therapists in India today? Other than hospitals, private practice, and schools, where do they find work?
It can be said that speech therapy is still in its infancy as the number of qualified speech therapists in India is very small. Only in the recent past, a few training programmes have started in non-governmental set-ups in India. Not many leading hospitals and clinics and very few schools in urban India have speech therapists.
The job prospects are tremendous. The services of speech therapists, apart from the hospitals, private practice, and schools, are available in community-based rehabilitative programmes, special schools for persons with disabilities, departments of physical medicine, old age homes, training institutes and research institutes.

What about job prospects abroad? Which countries have opportunities for Indian speech therapists? Which countries are Indian speech therapists working in?
Speech-language pathologists and audiologists have job prospects within and outside the country. Many students, mostly postgraduates in speech pathology or audiology, find placements in the USA, the UK, Canada and Gulf countries.