You’re Not Making $60/hour: The Lies Buried in SLP Job Posts

9:15PM May 10, 2025

Speakers:

Jeanette Benigas

Preston Lewis

Meredith Herold

Keywords:

Speech language pathology

job trends

CCC

Informed Jobs

pay transparency

W2 vs 1099

paperwork norms

wage data

job postings

SLP contracts

financial literacy

job market

employer requirements

wage norms

job search.

Hey, fixers. I'm Dr Jeanette Benigas, the owner of fix SLP, a grassroots advocacy firm here to challenge the status quo in speech language pathology by driving real change from insurance regulations to removing barriers that prevent full autonomy like the CCC, this podcast is your space to learn, engage and take action in the field of speech language pathology. We don't wait for change. We make it so let's fix SLP!

Hey everybody, welcome back. We have Meredith Harold with us today. Back from you might know her from The Informed SLP, but she is also with now the Informed Jobs it is launched. They're going strong. I've been watching carefully. You guys see me sharing a lot that's not sponsored. I am sharing it because it is just really good stuff for our field. So she's going to be talking to us today and giving us some updates with trends she's seeing on job postings specifically related to the CCC, I hope. But before we jump in, I'm just gonna read a quick review. This is from @notarealkaren. Love that @notarealkaren said, stop wishing and take action. Thank you so much for the hustle. Is a lie. All of your podcasts are so informative and relevant to SLPs on the ground, but this one really resonated. Thank you for all you do. Thanks, Karen, @notarealkaren. And so if you guys haven't heard the hustle is a lie, scroll back a little bit. Go take a look. I don't know off the top of my head, what day we released that. Oh, I just looked March 11. Go back and look for March 11. You can tune in. So hey, Preston, Hi. How was your vacation?

It was terrific. I really enjoyed participating in the Canadian election. Always feels good to step outside and go knock on doors, meet a lot of fun. People got to fly in a sea plane for the first time. That was great. Crossing the water from Vancouver to Nanaimo. Ate some great food and made it back in time to have a few days in Dallas, Texas with my wife, as we always try to make our schedules work. So yeah, it's great to be in conversation with you. And I just got really giddy when you said we're going to bring Meredith on and let's talk about jobs. And I said, Oh, this is perfect. The timing couldn't be better. So it's great to see you both.

Yeah, because this, this is gonna air at least a week from now, maybe, if not more. But so I'm gonna reference something that is no longer there. But yesterday, I shared one of the Informed Jobs stories, and it said, this is hiring season, and this is hiring season. We have a lot of new grads coming out of school. We have people making changes. Springtime is the time people sell their houses and move. So there. This is a busy time of year for SLPs and job changes or new jobs. So it what they had to share was a really good resource. So yeah, hi Meredith!

Hey, how's it going? I've been busy. Yes, I have, as Jeanette mentioned, I'm the owner of The Informed SLP. And Informed Jobs is our kind of newest project. We started building it last summer and fall, and kind of, you know, dropped, you know, information and hits that it was coming. But the jobs database officially launched in January. So basically, it's kind of like indeed, except for SLPs only. SLPs, can use it for free. Employers are the ones who paid a post there, but we do have it built in a way that is, like, friendly to small, private practices. So like, if you're a member of the Informed SLP, you can get two free job posts per year and stuff like that. So it's very affordable. So that just gives you the context of, like, what it is that we're doing. But the real reason why we're here to talk about stuff is because I didn't realize how little we understand about our own pay as SLPs, and how screwed over we're regularly getting until I started getting into this work truly, and some of the things that I've learned over the last you know, three to six months have kind of just been mind boggling. And I want you all to know this information so that you can protect yourself on the job market, even if you never search from jobs, you know on our website. So this is just, like, basic financial information that I've been, like, really surprised by. So um, so let's just get into it. So when we when I first planned to start Informed Jobs, one of the main motivations for me is as an employer of SLPs, I was getting really sick of these stupid job posts that don't even have pay in them. You know what I mean, nor do they have settings. So you'll see, you know, it on SLP, Facebook groups, you'll see it on LinkedIn. Indeed, you know all over the place where it's like you. Come work at our super great place with competitive pay, and it's like, thank you for this competitive pay. Why don't you have the pay listed in the job post, you know, and also not saying settings, like a lot of contract companies in particular, will have job posts, but they won't tell you where you're gonna work. They don't tell you what setting it's going to be, or even if they say it's a school job, you don't know what school district it is. And so there just was not enough information job posts, right? So when I first started this, I thought that mostly it was an issue of, oh, we're going to make sure all job posts have pay. Step one, you know? Step two, we're going to teach SLPs how to understand the difference between w2 and 1099 jobs. Because that was another big problem I was noticing where SLPs don't know consistently know the difference, and know that, for example, if you take a 1099 you need to be paid between 10 and 30% more than if it's w2 so like w2 50 per hour should be about 30% higher if it's 1099 you know. And so I thought it was kind of as simple as that, like, let's just get pay and job posts. Let's get information and job posts, and let's teach people how to do basic calculations or adjustments for 1099 versus w2 but the two things that I actually want to talk to you about today, because anyone who's like, more advanced will be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, obvious, obvious. This is basic stuff. Like, I'm not a newbie. I know these things. And if you are a new grad and are a newbie, we have resources about the difference between 1099, and w2 you can go on informedjobs.com, and read it, but we're gonna move straight into advanced time, okay? Because, like, this is what really started to scare me, is that I found that even people like you and I, Jeanette, like our peers, who've been in the field, you know, 1020, years and are highly informed, still don't understand these two things. Okay, so thing number one that really started to like mess things up when I realized it is the paper visit contracts. So a lot of SLP contracts, right? You're only paid per visit or per session or time only, right?

I just left a job that was that because, and you're going to get into this when it was all done and done, I was making 20 to $35 an hour.

Exactly. That - that is going to be the take home of this discussion. So basically, we thought that with pay for per visit contracts, that what we would be able to do is take these jobs in and, you know, like, oh, it's pay per visit, $50 per hour, and then we would have the employer, like, you know, describe any details related to that, because there's always all these, like, ridiculous details, like, you're paid $15 for emails and admin time, and you're paid $175 for an eval but $50 per hour for treatment time. And we knew that we wanted to require that level of detail. But it wasn't until we were trying to do the math ourselves that we suddenly had this moment about three weeks into running the jobs database, where we were like, oh shit, we can't calculate pay. Like, you cannot calculate a pay per visit job, what you're actually going to make unless you ask the employer really explicit questions. And at first we were like, oh, like, we just need to ask them about things like cancelation rate, you know, their average cancelation rate, and whether or not they pay for travel time. And we just kind of got to this point where we started to realize there's not enough questions that you can ask. Like, basically, what you really have to ask in these jobs is, on average, what do your people make per year? Okay.

And I, I've seen you recommending that, and I've had thoughts. I've given you a lot of thoughts, but I haven't actually given you this thought, okay, the job that I just left had five SLPs, we had have one who has worked there for seven years, where we were all PRN, first of all, she has worked there for seven years. She is their main person, and she takes 30 visits a week. And so if you were to ask that question, they would give you her answer, right? Yeah, where the one, the newest one, who hardly gets any work, maybe has one to two visits a week, if that.

Yeah

And then there's

We're asking the question is, we ask the range and average. So we say, what is the range and what is the average? So, like, what we tend to get in a practice like that is, you know, they'll tell us, Oh, so, like, we pay, you know, $50 per hour, which, if it's a paper visit contract, that's not even a number. Like, you need to start just treating it as not even a real number, you know. And then they'll say, say to us, okay, so, like, the range is, you know, 50 grand a year to up to 90 grand per year. And the average is, you know, 70 or whatever it may be. And that, first of all, that's about as good as it's going to get. Because reality is that with pay per visit contracts, there's a there is a huge range of different. Difference with individual humans on how many people they're able to take on their caseload, you know, like, how like, productive they're able to be and stuff, there is a huge range, but at least we need to get to the point where we're starting to, like, just, first of all, disclose that range and the average to SLPs, right? And, like, describe it in words as much as possible, and then rewind it back to the hourly rate from that so that allows us to then be able to calculate, like the true hourly rate, and the fact that it's like $35 per hour is really what you're making per hour, not 50 per hour. And we also have kind of like a fail proof method too, because we get private practices that are like, I've never hired anyone before, and so I don't have an average. We're just, you know, going for this. We use a 30% rule. And so that's another thing that, as an SLP, you can do is basically, if it's a paper visit contract at $50 per hour, and the employer cannot give us adequate enough information about the average and range for people who would have this job and are working full time, so that we can really calculate it out, then we just knock 30% off. So I can't do this in my head. I'm not a mental math person. 50, oh, and I don't have enough light in this room, 50. I have one of those. Look at my calculator. Jeanette, it's like powered powered by the sun. You have a calculator on your computer. That you can pull up 50 times point seven. Okay, so if you're so $50 per hour, you need to treat it as $35 per hour. So when you're comping against other jobs that actually pay for all hours worked or are salaried, you need to, like, start to get to that point. And and this is, and the way that I know that SLPs are not doing this math and are not thinking about it this way is based on the conversations people continue to have on social media where it's like, okay, so like, I got this $60 per hour job offer. Like, is that good for Chicago? And that's all people ask. And nobody asks clarifying questions. They don't say, is it like paper visit, like direct time only? Is that $50 per hour? And you know, you're paid 40 hours per week no matter what? Is it a nine month contract? It is? Is it a 12 month contract? Is it w2 is it 1099, they we have as a field, just gotten so hung up on this hourly rate that basically It's blinding us, and we can't calculate our own wages because we don't realize that there's follow up questions you need to ask. So it's created this kind of perfect storm where what employers can do is advertise an hourly rate and it looks good like we've seen jobs come into our database where, like, the hourly rate on the contract, what it says is 90 per hour, 120 per hour. And we've also, I've also seen it happen on social media, where, like, you know, somebody will get on there and they'll be like, Oh, 90 per hour, you know, work in the city. And people are like, yes, yes, yes. That's the kind of wages we want fade. If you did the math, you'd realize that's not a 90 per hour job. You know what? I mean? It's basically like they're using our hourly rate as a vanity metric, you know, where it doesn't actually carry any meaning. So the short of it for SLPs is we need to start actually paying attention to hourly and annual wages. You should never be taking a job where you're only thinking about the hourly without asking the employer information about annual. We have no problems with employers disclosing this like, there's been very few people who, when we ask them these questions for because we ask, like, we force employers to disclose this information in order to post with us, you know, and they do, like, we've had hardly anybody who's been like, I don't know what that is. I can't disclose it like they can disclose it. And we need to get them in that habit of just asking our employers, what can I expect to make in a year? You know, if you are taking on one of those type of contracts, and then also make sure that you get a range from them. So if you ask the question, What can I expect to make in a year? And they're like, Oh, we expect that you'll be making $90,000 and be like, Okay, is there a situation, though, in which I could make as low as 60, for example. And can you describe that situation for me? Because I just need to be able to, like, make sure I can pay my rent, and I'm taking a job that, you know, I'm excited about, or whatever so, and kind of just like another interesting anecdote. So when at the early stages of building our jobs database. We were having a conversation with Informed SLP staff in our slack because I was trying to decide if how we should like lead with pay in the jobs database, if we should lead with annual or lead with hourly, and which we should be converting from. And there was lots of pros and cons of various things, because I could tell that most people weren't really paying close enough attention to their annual pay. And so in our Informed SLP slack, we have a lot of SLPs who work full time or part time jobs, and then also work with us, you know. And so I just posed the question. I was like, how do you all think about pay? Every single one of them, they said that they think about pay as hourly, not annual. So when they're looking for jobs, they're thinking about pay. Is hourly. So we already have our like brains primed to be taken advantage of, primed to be taken advantage of, with these like funky contracts where you're not actually paid for all hours worked. But then the other shocking thing to me is I was like, well, so how much are you all like, how much are you guys making per year? Because I had people in there being like, Oh, I work, you know? I'm making this per hour at my hospital. I'm making this per hour. Almost all of them said, I don't know. I've never calculated that. And how on earth we can like as a field of people who've collectively identified that were underpaid compared to similar professions, and we want to drive our wages up. If you don't, aren't regularly calculating what you're making per year. You don't know what you're making, and that was the case for my own staff. Like these are people who read journal articles and are like former gifted kids who understand statistics, and they're still not calculating their annual pay. And so I started to dig in deeper. And I was like, well, like, Let's talk this through. And so I have one staff member who does, like, early intervention home health, right, where she's driving to kids homes and seeing kids, and she's on a paper visit contract. And she was like, Yeah, I mean, it's just so variable, because, like, during cold and flu season, a lot of the kids cancel. And so like, I could be ready to work, but I don't end up seeing the kids and so like in her brain, because it's variable, it like can't be calculated, but it has to be calculated because that variability actually is predictable. Cancelation rates and kids being absent during cold and flu season, that is predictable. You know what I mean? You might have a year where it's worse than other years, but we as SLPs need to be paying attention to that so that we can be like, okay, even you know, reality is, I'm actually only making $55,000 per year in this job, and that's what I made last year. And maybe I want to see if I can, like, adjust that this year, and if I can't adjust it based on what I'm making in truly taking home every month, like, maybe that school job that was paying $75,000 for nine months really isn't that bad, you know what I mean. So any thoughts or questions about that before I move on to other things?

No, I'm just thinking, yeah, as you're saying, you know, well, kids get sick, they cancel another thing that would kill me, and it this was leading up to, like me leaving this job was, you know, there's, there's no mileage reimbursement, there's no travel reimbursement for the job that I had, they had me on a w2 which meant I couldn't write off my mileage or taxes, or, you know, I couldn't write anything off. We had to use our own computers, our own phones, all of our own hot spots, all of our own equipment. Now, I'm already writing off my internet because I own a business, but what about the SLPs who don't now, you can't write that off, you know, you you don't have an office, so you can't write off your home, you know, because you're not a 1099, I couldn't. I was already, again, already writing everything off, but when it came down to the tons of miles I was driving and unable to even get compensated for that, now I'm, I'm using my resources to do their business right, right? So that was another layer in my head that I'm like, I'm literally giving like, I'm paying for their internet. I'm paying they wanted, you know, they wanted patients to sign that we were there on every note. And the only I don't have a touch screen computer, so the only way to do that would be to pull up my cell phone and have them touch my screen. And so if I see five patients a day in a house where they're not always the cleanest, you can't use those purple capped wipes on the touchscreen of your cell phone. You're not supposed to be using chemicals like that on your cell phone. So am I just gonna put that on my face all day and risk like infection, or am I gonna degrade the touchscreen of my cell phone to stay sanitary? So like, those are all the things I started talking about or thinking about, but then what really got me there at the end was I had a really problematic patient who would play games with me and lived about 25 minutes from me. I drove to his house for a scheduled appointment and he wouldn't answer the door. I don't get paid if they don't answer the door, right? So I drove 50 minutes on my dime to stand on his on his step for five minutes to knock and then went home. That was an hour of my day. Yeah, that I just lost money, yeah. And that was one of the last straws. I was like, I'm, I'm, I'm done with this.

Yeah. And that's another like, kind of just like, brief aside, too. For some of the like newer SLPs, who are like, Hey, don't really understand what they're talking about with what I can and can't write off in this 1099 w2 thing, the simplest way to think about it, that should really cause it to sink in is, as a 1099 contractor, you're your own business owner, so as soon as you sign a 1099 contract, congratulations, you just opened a business. Okay? And there's pros and cons to that. One of the cons is you're paying your own self employment tax, so you're paying way more taxes out of your own pocket as a 1099 that otherwise your employer is legally required to pay for you. But then also, as Jeanette is talking about, the write off situation, because you're a business owner, you actually have a lot more ability to, like, sadly, write things off, whether or not it's expenses like buying a laptop, expenses like your cell phone, your cell phone bill, your travel mileage, like Jeanette said, and Jeanette even mentioned, like home office, I actually write off this room. So I'm at my house right now. This room, as a percentage of square feet of my house, is a write off for my business, where it's a percentage of our mortgage, a percentage of our utility bills, a percentage of everything, because I'm doing my business daily within this little room, right? So good versus bad, with 1099 versus w2 it's not like w2 employee good, 1099 bad, it's more just like you really have to understand the pros and cons in order to not get screwed over and make sure that you're taking advantage of things that you can't.

So, you know, one of the things that jumped out to me, it's just a wealth of information that you've put out there about how we conduct our business, how we really look At pay and you mentioned new SLPs. And so I'm going to ask kind of a two part question to both of you. First, to you Meredith, which is, has academia asked for you, or, you know, to come in and talk to some SLPs in different settings and that are in schools about how to do this, because that's what really will raise that average, when you think about that's what'll allow us to finally get out of the doldrums when it comes to pay so I'll ask that question to you, and then to Jeanette, my former you know, pointy headed academic elitist, if they're not having that conversation, why the hell not so Meredith, is academia wanting to talk about this yet?

Last fall, I actually was doing a whole bunch of lectures to graduate students, because I wanted to figure out, how do I present this information to graduate students in a way that isn't terrifying, but keeps them informed, and a way that I feel like they can fly from the nest and make a good decision without messing things up, essentially. So no, it's not being taught in most graduate programs. No, most new grads have absolutely no idea, like I said to Jeanette. Like people who've been in the field 1015, years still don't fully understand this, you know what I mean. And so I actually am working on creating some like videos that can just stay on our website and pushing it out to grad schools as much as possible, just to be like, Hey, here's an hour long video. At least. Tell your students about it. Talk about it in class. Don't talk about it in class. You know, at least let them know. But I think a lot, a lot a lot of faculty don't realize how big problem is. They don't realize what's actually happening on the job market, because that's not how their contracts are structured. And they haven't thought it through. I need to be honest, I had only partially thought it through when I was about to do this jobs database. The only thing that made it really sink in for me was doing the math, because our team does the math on every single job post. Once I started doing the math and seeing how misleading these contracts were and how difficult it was to do the math and how we had to change the types of questions we asked employers in order to do the math correctly, that's when I finally was like, dude, SLPs are out here signing contracts on jobs where their pay is a mystery. They could be making between about $45,000 a year and $95,000 a year. And little factors that they're not doing the math on will make the difference in that. What is the point of all these negotiation and raise discussions we always have where we're like, you know, do you think I can tuck my employer into a 2% raise this year? I don't know if you can. I don't know if you can. Dude, what if we just stopped taking shitty contracts in the first place that are making 1020, $30,000 worth of a difference. You know what I mean? Step one is get into a good contract negotiations and raises are so much further down the line, we just need to stop taking bad jobs in the first place, or not necessarily bad jobs. Sometimes people want a very specific, highly flexible job in a very specific setting or city. It's cool, but at least consent to what you're doing. Don't take a job where you're making 50 and thought you were going to make 70. And then that's the point we need to get to.

The other thing that I experienced with this job that I left, they had a QA department, like a quality control type department that reviewed everyone's paperwork before submitting it to insurance, which I understand to ensure that they're getting reimbursement. That is important. Right? But I've never worked for a company that had that, and I know that it wasn't just me. I know that all the other SLPs struggled with this, and I know it was going on with every profession within this company. It was a home health company, so they had nurses and you know, because every Thursday, they would send out an educational email to tell us how to word things and what to put in this line and but I would go to a patient's house try to do the paperwork there, knowing I'm only getting paid per visit, and if I bring it all home, technically I'm not really getting paid for that regularly, regularly. This QA department would send paperwork back, and so even if I did do it at the patient's house, now daily, daily, because even if I'm doing visits once a week or twice a week as my PRN job, the paperwork still has to be submitted on time, and we're supposed to have a 24 hour submission, whatever. So daily, I would have to check to see if QA sent it back so I could fix it. And that would take so much time I didn't even know to ask that question. So a former colleague just asked. He's with a different home health company, and he's do he's not in the therapy department, but they need a speech therapist, so I met with their director of rehab, and I asked these kinds of questions. You think he's called me back, right? Well, we have some other interviews today. No, I haven't heard from him, because I was, I, you know, I was asking the questions that would force them to compensate me, and I don't need the job anyway. I was just doing my friend a favor. But now I know to ask those questions. It took so much time the paperwork, redoing the paperwork, took so much freaking time.

Yeah, that's why I feel like it's like one of the things that I like about our database is we're asking the questions. So you as the SLP, don't have to know what to ask and enter those difficult conversations we do, and it's just standard as part of the database. You know what I mean. So we can be the bad guy that force them to disclose information that SLPs need to know, and then SLPs can be the good guy who, you know, just applies for the job and shows them why they're a high quality candidate and stuff like that.

Another question for you is, do you have a QA department reviewing paperwork? Because if they do your SLP needs to know, you're probably redoing paperwork regularly?

Yeah, there's paper things like paperwork norms, and again, that's why, remember how I said we thought we could just ask all these little questions like, what's your cancelation rate? What's your travel time policy, what's your paperwork policy? How many hours per week do you have staff doing indirect versus direct? Because that was one way we thought we'd be able to do it, is for them to describe to us direct versus indirect hours. No, none of it is nearly as reliable. Is just asking the employer tell me what your average payroll looks like, because that they, for damn sure know, and don't need to think about it. You know what? I mean. They they know what they're paying their people every month. Just tell us the average and range, and then we'll take it from there. Sorry, go ahead. Meredith, oh, so you said you had a two part question. What was the other part? Because we got on...

Well earlier I was going to push it to Jeanette. I mean, why the hell aren't the colleges putting this in there just as mandatory in the last year of graduation before we send you out of the nest? Like Meredith said here, this is what you need to know. They sure as hell didn't teach it when I was in school. They acted like, Oh, you're just everybody line up and they're going to hand you a big wad of money when you get out of here. And we didn't know anything we went into it, just, you know, completely blind, and like Meredith said, you just kind of look at that one number, whether it's the salary or the hourly, yay. Look what I got. And not knowing a thing. Why aren't they talking about it? This is what will drive and sustain our field.

I think because most full time academic faculty don't know jack shit about it. They don't practice. They've never practiced, or they haven't practiced in 15 years. They don't realize what's actually going on in the world. I know that I talk to my students about that. I know that in one particular cohort, couple years ago, they were all applying for a job about 20 minutes down the road from me, and a very close friend of mine had worked there, and she knows how awful the job is. She she left, slash, sort of got fired during COVID Because they were asking her to come to meetings and work while they were all getting unemployment or something. And so she asked about it, and it turned into a mess. That's when I started talking to that particular cohort, because they made the same crappy. Offer, I think, to five or six of my students, and so I would point out to each of them, take a look at the vacation time are they matching for your retirement? How many hours is this kinds of things Meredith just brought up, maybe not to that extent, because I could make my point pretty easily in in three questions, but also look at how long this job has been posted. There is a reason why this job has been posted for this long, and there is a reason why people aren't taking this job. And then thankfully, that particular year, they all declined, and I think I ended up sending out a message to the entire cohort with the job posting to say, I've already talked to multiple of you who have gone to interview for this job. I want you all to see this. Here's the questions I'm asking. Here's the problematic points with this job posting. Why is their turnover so high? Right? And so actually, I wasn't there to see like this last cohort through one of my former students from the cohort when I left, actually took that job. I wasn't there to talk to them about it, which is really unfortunate. So I was, but I know how bad that job was. I know the problems there, and I was able to coach them through that, but I think most people just don't know.

And also, things have changed a lot. So, you know, I got my master's degree in oh eight, and then graduated with my PhD in 2011 but when I was looking for clinical jobs in, you know, because my first clinical job was actually in 2010 2011 this wasn't a thing. Most SLPs were still actually being offered salaried jobs, not hourly. And also, most of our jobs were w2 the number of jobs that are being presented as hourly, and your contract is written hourly. But then there's all these funky details that make it hard to calculate what you're really going to be paid. And the incidence of 1099, jobs just keep going. Up, up, up, up, up, up, even if you know you have a faculty that was that like, has a long clinical history and worked 10 years in the field before they switched over to being a faculty, they can't rely on what was happening over 5... 10, years ago, because it's not the same anymore. You know what I mean? These companies are savvy, and they're finding, finding ways to basically deal with the fact that our reimbursement rates can be pretty low and stuff like that. I also think it's kind of difficult to be like these evil companies. They're just trying to, like, take all of our money. Well, some of them kind of, yeah, but also they're dealing with their own barriers on the reimbursement side, which is why they're trying to come up with creative ways to pay us less. Okay, so it's not that they're evil. They're also just trying to keep their business alive, but what we as SLPs have the right to do is to be like, I still get to choose which job I take, you know. And so I understand why some companies might structure contract tracks in weird ways. I understand why somebody come some companies might pay way less than average. But we as SLPs have the right to choose our jobs and to understand what we're going to be paid, period. So, you know, it doesn't have to be a like, evil, bad person thing, you know, like, do you want to choose an above average paying job or a below average paying job? And on that note, too, we're blocking jobs below the 10th percentile in our jobs database. So you'll see jobs that are in really high paying in our database. And you're like, Yes, that's what I've been looking for. And you'll see jobs where you're like, wow, that's kind of mid but it's because there are jobs on our database that are paying in the 30th percentile, and we accept them because we made the decision that there's reasons that people want certain jobs other than pay, and so we felt comfortable with blocking things below the 10th percentile, but we didn't want our threshold to be any higher than that. We should move on to another topic that. So there's basically two things. I wanted to make sure that people understood. One, you can't figure out what your pay is going to be if all you know is the hourly rate without asking more questions. That's take home. Number one, take home. Number two is, we don't have wage norms in our field. I thought we did. We do not. Okay, so here's the situation on that last year when we were building out plans for Informed Jobs, I was like, isn't it so funny how SLPs are constantly asking on social media, is this good pay for San Diego? Is this good pay for Chicago? I'm taking a hospital job in Orlando. Do you guys think this is good pay? And the whole time, I was like, people realized that they could just go look this information up, right? I thought that what the barrier was is that people didn't quite know where to go find that information. So they were using Facebook friends as their very own Google I should have known better, that it was because our wage norms are shit and broken. So I started creating resources to point SLPs toward which wage norms are good, and found out just how bad they are. So. So the most common source of wage data in our field is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS data. And the BLS data is what our fields scientists use when they publish about wages in our field, the BLS data, because it's considered the best or primary resource, is also what a lot of websites use. So when you see information about what SLPs are paid. It's often coming from the BLS so Bureau of Labor Statistics, a bunch of economists with PhDs working for the federal government, collecting data. Now, how do they get this data? Because basically what I'm gonna explain to you is all the BLS data is wrong, and you mostly can't use it, but most, but people don't tend to understand why. So we're gonna go through that. So the way they get the BLS data is from unemployment data. So the BLS is collecting unemployment statistics, and they're collecting information on the job that you lost and what you were being paid. So imagine an SLP is submitting their data, and they're like, I was in a job where I was making x per year. I was in a job where I was making x per hour, and you can submit the data either way, as hourly or as annual. Two problems with that for SLPs, first of all, if you submit your pay as annual, it would probably be important to know if you're on a nine month contract, like a school based SLP, or a 12 month contract, That's level one that messes up the data. Level two, that messes up the data is people are inputting their hourly rate, which is in their contract. But as we just discussed for like the last 20 minutes, that hourly rate is a nonsense number. So what they're inputting is pay per visit hourly rates. So imagine an SLP says I was making $60 per hour at this full time job. The BLS processes that data as great. So $60 times 40 hours per week, times four weeks in a month, times 12 months in a year, that number is 2080 2080 is kind of like this magic number that you can lock in your head, because it's the number that is always used by any economist and any HR department to go between hourly and annual. They take that 60, multiply it 20 times 2080 let's get my cell phone out again. What's 60 times 2080 $124,000 now SLPs, who know what SLPs make? Know that that might not be right. The BLS doesn't know that it might not be right. And because our field is small, and because nobody ever pays attention to it, and maybe they haven't received enough complaints, or maybe they just don't have the man hours to do it the right way. It means all the BLS data is wrong. All the BLS data is wrong. And you can kind of prove it to yourself by if you go to the BLS website, they have it divided by setting an hourly and annual. So it'll be like in an elementary school as an SLP, you'd make this per hour this per year. In a hospital, you'd make this per hour this per year. They break it down by state. They break it down by city. They have a really deep data set, but always the hourly column and the annual column are multiply, multiply or divide those numbers. It's always multipliable by 2080, so does that make sense for why that would be just wildly wrong. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low, it's a crap shoot. And I think the thing that really messes up people when they look at the numbers is sometimes it looks right and sometimes it is right, because if you get just enough overestimate and just enough underestimate into a data set, sometimes you can conveniently land in the middle and end up with the right number. But you don't know when that's the case based on what data is being dumped in.

But Meredith, doesn't ASHA save us? Can't we go there and look?

Here's the one situation in which I'm gonna say ASHA killed it. ASHA actually does it, right? So ASHA collects, collects wage data every single year, and they alternate every other year, where one year they'll do schools, one year they'll do health care settings. They don't make the mistake that the BLS does, because, shockingly, ASHA actually understands what SLP contracts look like. And I don't know who they have running this, but my assumption would be a Master's or PhD level person who understands data and understands SLP contracts is actually collecting and analyzing this data. They don't mess it up. But I will say the one problem with it is their data set isn't deep enough. So A, on average, is usually only able to collect about 2000 respondents to their surveys. So ashes data is right, but it's based on a teensy, tiny data set. You can't do savvy things with it. It's broken down by state. But how useful is that? You know what I mean, like, we need deeper data sets that are setting plus state, plus how many years you are in the field, or whatever. One other layer to this, there's other sources of wage data that are the worst of all. So there's, like, the BLS that people think is right and it's totally wrong. There's ASHAs, which is actually right, but it's a teensy, tiny data set, so it's not as useful as it could be, but it's the best thing, honestly, that you could rely on right now. So if you're an SLP today that wants to know what. SLP, wages are you actually need to be using ashes data s et, but then...

I should probably cut that out. I'm kidding

It's accurate.

I'll leave it.

It could be better, but it's good.

Yeah, and we do give ASHA credit when

When credit is due you got to give it, right? That's how you know then

It hurts my skin, but we'll, we'll do we'll leave it in.

Yeah, you can accept that. And then the third source of data that is, like really wildly wrong, is a lot of websites will create wage norms based on job posts. So let's think this through real jobs. Employers aren't in most states, employers don't legally have to put pay in the job description. Also these job websites like, indeed, even when an employer does put pay in, they still multiply it times 2080 so you still get those same situations where it's a $60 per hour job times 40 hours per week, times, you know, 12 months out of the year. And so indeed, we'll be like, this is 100 and, you know, $30,000 a year job, and it's like, no, it's not. You just don't understand that hourly doesn't mean hourly in our field, you know. And so you only have the highest paying jobs that are willing to disclose in the first place, because they're using pay as a way to drive traffic to their job posts. And you have the calculations being wrong. So when it's coming from like, indeed, glass door. LinkedIn, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It's even worse than the BLS data, because they're pulling from the top and doing the math wrong. And you know how we get those articles every so often, Jeanette, where it'll be like, SLPs are the top 10 paid profession in the US, and we're like, what it's because they're using those data sources. Because if you do it wrong enough, you can quote find data. Nobody sees me doing these air quotes here. Find data indicating that SLPs make $170,000 per year on average, because they're pulling data from jobs databases in the wrong way. So anyhow, long story short, the point I'm making is like we have horrible wage data in our field. We are at Informed Jobs starting to collect it, so we are right now at probably about I haven't checked it in a couple weeks, so who knows, but probably about 1400 respondents. I haven't driven it fast, because I need to be ready to dump it into something that's useful, rather than just a PDF on a website that says, here's the average for this setting, here's the average for 1099, versus w2 here's the average for California. Because, again, like I said, that's what makes state ashes data not that helpful, because people need to be able to compare multiple factors at once. So what my plan is is to have a resource where you can say, I'm checkbox in the first five years of the field, I'm checkbox looking at this setting, I'm checkbox looking at this state. And we can even use cost of living to match to zip code, so that you can put your cost of living in there too. And you can get a cost of living index, because jobs across an entire state aren't all going to be paid the same or whatever. And then get the averages and the ranges for that, because that's what, that's what SLPs really need, is to be able to, like, dump in several different factors and then pump out at an average. So I'm working on that. It's not going as fast as I wish I could go, but I swear this will be happening within 2025 but it's not live yet. And then once I get something like that live. That's when we're really going to push harder for wage data to basically be like, here is what we're giving you. You can use it and you can use it for your own city to show that, like, oh, we only have five data points in Chicago right now for what I'm asking it for, and that I'm hoping will be enough to, like, get SLPs to dump in their own data and get it to be something that's useful.

Thinking about SLPs that are listening to this, particularly new ones. And one of the things that you know, I see it on social media often, they weigh in, you know, is this great? What do you think of this salary for this city? I'm wondering. Meredith, have you had people reach out and say, Can I just pay you on a consult basis to guide me through my job search? And Informed is doing a great job. That's glad we've got that. But are there some SLPs that want that additional consultation right now? Because I would think they would.

But I would prefer to build a resource that's free for SLPs and paid for by employers and just how we permanently want it, because it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable to like, have SLPs pay on a one off basis for consult if we all band together around this and are like, yes, we want a source of better wage data. Yes, we want job posts where the employer has disclosed everything I need to know. I believe that SLPs need and want that enough that it will get big enough that we don't need to ask SLPs to pay us, because employers will gradually start to realize, oh, there's really high traffic on this website. If I want my job filled, I should probably post it on this website. And that's the goal. And it will take a while. My goal is to push SLPs wages up through what we're doing.

That's I appreciate that, because rather than rent a fair. Three across the river. You're building that bridge, you're system...

Yeah, and then everybody can just walk across it, right? Like you want to walk across the bridge, come on over. Yeah.

Can I talk about a number real quick? There's a number like around 38?

Oh... I know what you're talking about. Yeah. So on our jobs database, we we have it built for SLPs in the first place, where there's lots of different filters that are highly useful to SLPs, not so much to other people. One of our filters, for example, is, does the job accept CFS? We ask employers, they tell us, so if you're a CF you can go right to our website and immediately Narrow by everyone who's accepting CFS. But the one that you're talking about is another very SLP specific filter we have that, do they require CS? And that's one of the things that we built in from the get go, because anybody which is really relevant to the fixed SLP platform, because you all tend to have a lot more people who don't have their Cs, anybody who doesn't have their Cs, or is considering if that would be a risk to them, can see live the data on what types of jobs don't require Cs. So it's a filter on our website. You can just click it, you know, does not require Cs. And what we're finding is it varies per week, right? Because we've got jobs coming in and out and in and out, but consistently, 30 to 40% of jobs don't require Cs. It's never dipped below 30, and it actually hasn't yet dipped above 40. It's always 30 to 40% of employers don't require Cs. So...

You got a new metric Jeanette!

That's wild, because if you read our social media where we talk about this stuff, people will comment, but every employer requires the CCC.

No. And here's the other layer to it. I will say, if an HR department is just copy pasting a job post onto indeed, sometimes it will say requires Cs. But when you explicitly have in the form, do you require Cs, or are you willing to accept someone who has their license? Like, if you actually educate them just to smidgen, they're like, actually, no, we would accept people that just have their license we don't really need Cs because they don't know what they're asking for in the first place. Sometimes it does feel like all these employers require Cs, but all you have to do is dig a smidgen deeper and be like, Are you sure? Because it's not legally required in your state, and we don't even have to have these conversations. All we have to do is ask the question explicitly, rather than allowing an HR department to copy paste in a job post where one of the bullet points is Cs, and they don't know what the hell they're copy pasting into the job post, because they don't know what that means in the first place. So when it's an explicit question where they have to say yes or no, what it requires the HR department to do is go ask somebody if they don't know the answer to it, and then once they ask somebody, they realize actually, no, that's not required.

And I bet for the ones where they have to go ask somebody they're asking their most senior, SLP, who doesn't understand either? And so one would really push into that, yeah, yeah, it could probably easily be changed. And I think that is the importance of our employee education campaign that's going to be coming shortly after our new website is launched, that all we have to do is start asking and educating. And there are a couple states, these Medicaid problematic states that we're still working on where, okay, you do have to have them, but that is a small percentage and a small majority of all of us. And if we would all just keep asking, even if you get a no the first time, if enough people ask, if you revisit it every quarter, if you keep educating, you keep supplying information, eventually the answer could change. One no doesn't mean no forever. And so this is a group effort, right? You're fixing SLP by addressing data and wage wages like wage data, educating SLPs on how to get paid more. You're doing that little portion, our little portion hopefully will be through, through this education campaign is, this is how you educate your employer. We can all do our part to all make a change, but everybody has to do it. No one's coming to save us. We have to save ourselves. We all have to do it. If we don't do it, if we're all passive, nothing changes.

Yeah, and it's nice when you're able to identify things that really aren't that big of an ask, a little bit of an education, of your employer, it really isn't that big of an ask, but it can make an astronomical difference, because they don't know what they're doing in the first place. You know?

Especially in these states where we have already gotten Medicaid addressed, Arkansas, North Carolina and Michigan specifically, you all need to be educating your employers, because you really did need the CS until the last year, employers aren't paying attention to this stuff. They don't know. So we do have a resource. Yes, I think at least for Michigan and North Carolina, that points to the source documentation that can be shared with the employers, like fix SLP said, or whoever said, That doesn't matter. They need to see rules, regulations and source documentation. So we do share that kind of stuff. We have it on our website, but that's the kind of stuff that employers need to see. I know two years ago, we needed this, but look, we don't need it anymore. Here's Medicaid bulletin on this change. Here's their new handbook. Employers aren't going to keep up with this unless we ask. Nothing changes.

And even though we've got exceptions in Arkansas, I've had, I'm still having a difficult time just getting that bulletin written. Bureaucrats sometimes don't like to get pinned down. They recognize that the previous policy was not really compatible with the rules. But sometimes just bringing those new procedures, getting people away from copy and paste, it's hard, and we're still working on that. Yeah. Meredith, before I go to my day job in just a moment, if you're comfortable, in a few months coming back after Informed has got a little bit more time in it, and it's okay to share this proprietary information at some point. I want to know how many love connections you've made at a certain point with hooking up SLPs with great jobs. This is exciting, so I don't want to put you on the spot, but feel free to come back and

Yeah, for sure, quite a few, quite a few so far. And it's really fun to see it benefits good employers so much. And so that's really fun to be able to do. But another topic also that I can come back and discuss later, that would be super fun. So we can just leave leave. This teaser here is, remember how I said we reject stuff. We reject pay below the 10th percentile, productivity, over 85% and reasonable details undisclosed. So like, remember how I said, I want to know what setting they're working in. I want to know what city they're working in. Our refusal rate is between 20 and 30% still where 20 to 30% of employers can't meet those criteria. And there's some serious trends in who those employers are and what types of employers aren't meeting those trends. And I think that that'd be valuable information for SLPs too, in general, who tends to pay below the 10th percentile, who tends to have refusal to disclose productivity, or it's always above 85% stuff like that.

You just described my last two employers.

I can't name employers, yeah, but yeah, like, there's some trends. There's some trends that I think are important to look at. And one trend that I will say is we've refused some pretty big freaking companies, companies who were sponsors at ASHA have already been refused from our database because they submitted one job post, we told them it's not eligible for this reason, and there was nothing they could do about it. Their pay just is below the 10th percentile. And so that's another thing, all that's going to kind of unfold a bit over time. But how do we have these mega employers that are paying the worst wages in our entire field and are also paying to sponsor at ASHA and be at all of our conventions.

Mmm-hmm. Millions.

Preston's unofficial tagline, slogan out there for everybody, you know, if you're an SLP, and you don't want to let the bastards get you down, go to informedjobs.com. So there you go.

Yeah, awesome.

I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. All right, everybody. I'll just say thanks for fixing it. We'll see you next week!