Nel is a Hanen Certified Speech-Language Pathologist, having completed an It Takes Two To Talk certification workshop, and is a current member of The Hanen Centre. She is trained in The Lidcombe Program for the treatment of early stuttering, through the Lidcombe Program Trainers Consortium, and in The Camperdown Program, a speech restructuring program assisting adults and adolescents to control and manage their stuttering, through the Camperdown Program Trainers Consortium.

She is also trained in the foundations of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting, Reading And Spelling Skills), a phonetics teaching tool developed by The THRASS Institute for literacy instruction, and is a certified Sounds~Write practitioner, having undergone training in this Gold Standard linguistic phonics program for literacy. Nel has also completed training in Voicecraft Essentials, an assessment and treatment approach to voice disorders in both adults and children.

Nel is an Orofacial Myologist, having completed her training through The Australian Association of Orofacial Myology (AAOM) in 2014. She is a Provider Member of AAOM. Nel has a particular interest in mouth breathing and its effect on speech and language development.

Having undertaken Professional Supervision training with Michelle Bihary, Nel is also able to offer professional and clinical supervision to other speech pathologists.

Her 30-year career has progressed from teacher of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) to secondary school teacher of foreign languages (French, German, and Japanese) and Mathematics, and then to Speech Pathologist. She founded and managed Positive Speech, a private, independent speech pathology practice in the Southern Highlands of NSW from 2014 until 2021.