Meet our staff - Shagufta's story

I’ve been a Speech and Language Therapist since I graduated in 2009 and now work in Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust’s Quality Team as Deputy Clinical Quality Manager. I’m also one of the Trust’s Innovation Ambassadors. 

I thoroughly enjoyed and valued my time as a clinician and am proud to call myself a speech and language therapist and an AHP.

We have a lot of transferable skills, and I only truly appreciated the extent of these during the pandemic. I was redeployed to an operational lead role for one of the large-scale vaccination (LSV) sites which opened my eyes to the other job roles in Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust (CCS) and our corporate services.

I studied science at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and I then went into research when I qualified but missed the interaction with people and started looking into other careers. My Dad pointed me in the direction of speech and language therapy (something I’d never even heard of!), and I started looking into it more and decided to go back to uni and took the accelerated course to get my degree. I graduated in 2009, worked as a clinician until the pandemic when I was redeployed and then moved into the Quality Team not long after.

I love how diverse my career has been and how it's veered in new and exciting directions. My advice would be don’t be afraid to try something new! If you don’t like it, you can try something different again but, you never know, you may find out you’re where you’re meant to be.