2159V - Telepractice Soft Skills: The Skills You Weren't Taught but Need to Know

As clinicians continue to adopt telepractice in the wake of the global pandemic, the demand for soft skills training in telepractice will also rise. Soft skills are defined as areas not traditionally associated with the knowledge, skills, or abilities of telepractice services delivery (Botaitis & Southern, 2020). This session will introduce and describe the soft skills associated with telepractice services and speech-language pathology, including problem-solving skills, digital agility, cultural humility, creativity, and coping with compassion fatigue/burnout. Using interactive media, these topics will be discussed with respect to telepractice trends (Dixon et al., 2010), eLearning research (Bernd, 2008), and the author's ethnographic study of telepractice (Edwards-Gaither, 2020).