Thinking About Letting Your Clinical Certification Lapse?
Read This First!
By Carla Di Gironimo, MS, S-LP(C), CCC-SLP, Director of Speech-Language Pathology and Standards, SAC This article has been republished from the Summer 2013 issue of Communiqué. Please note that this article was originally published when Speech-Language and Audiology Canada (SAC) was called the Canadian Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists (CASLPA).A number of years ago, a certified member from British Columbia decided to let her membership lapse. In terminating her membership, she also lost her certification. Her decision was a conscious one: she was busy taking care of her young children and hadn’t worked for several years. At the time she didn’t think she would ever return to work. Why maintain CASLPA membership and certification when you’re a stay-at-home mom who’s 99% sure you won’t be returning to the workforce?
Because circumstances change and life has a tendency to throw curve balls.
Several years later, she had a change of heart. Her kids had grown up and she was looking for a new challenge. She was offered an exciting position that was just too good to turn down … but there was one major problem: her new employer required CASLPA Clinical Certification.
So, the only way she could become re-certified was to become a CASLPA member and write the CASLPA Clinical Certification Exam … again.
And she did.
Upon returning home from the exam, she sent CASLPA a note:
“Thank you again for the opportunity to write this exam. I hope you don’t mind, but I gave my fellow exam-writers a CASLPA announcement. With the invigilator’s permission I stood up and stroked my white hair and then told the sweet young things that they should never, ever stop paying their CASLPA fees. Otherwise they would be writing this exam again at my age. They laughed. But I hope they listened!”
Carla Di Gironimo, MS, S-LP(C), CCC-SLP
Director of Speech-Language Pathology and Standards, SAC
carla@sac-oac.ca
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