Do not start working here (especially in-home) if you care about ethics OR expect a stable job. - RBT - Registered Behavior Technician ABS Kids Employee Review

I was hired on as FULL TIME, already holding an RBT certification, and yet, it took me 3 weeks to receive more than 20 *scheduled* hours. THEN, I had 2 different clients (out of 3) who frequently cancelled, leaving me with basically no income. I was reassured week after week that the family who was cancelling up to 3 5hr sessions per week would receive notice of discontinuation of services if cancellations were to continue, however, it took 2 months for this to actually happen. They will continuously tout the fact that you can request to pickup shifts from other coworkers, however, these opportunities typically came up last minute, and were with clients who you didn't know. It seems highly inappropriate to me to enter someone's house as a stranger to provide "ABA therapy" for a client who you don't know. It's just not good ABA ethics. It also is not fair to employees to have to beg coworkers for hours. It is unacceptable to hire someone on "full time" and not be able to guarantee them at least 30 hours every week. Also, I never wanted to work as an in-home therapist, but was never given a choice between in-home and clinic setting. Then, once I started as an in-home RBT they were not willing to let me switch to clinic setting (because they didn't have the clients? Yet still continued to hire new employees for the clinic.... so that was political workplace nonsense.) Aside from this awful work culture, ethically, I disagreed with the way that in-home caseloads were handled. Clients were assigned DTT programs completely unrelated to their skill deficits or the behavioral/academic/social concerns that parents wanted to prioritize. I was honestly EMBARRASSED as an RBT because the work that I was doing with these parent's children was just not beneficial at all, and yet, of course, as an RBT you don't have the power to make programming decisions, but parents didn't always understand that and were looking at the work you were doing as though you were careless. (Which brings up the point that parent training desperately needed improvement as well, but that's a whole different story that all ABA clinics seem to struggle with at this point.) BCBA "consultants" use cookie-cutter approaches for programming as well as parent training and that really doesn't benefit anyone. It just felt like a huge disgrace to the beautiful science that is Applied Behavior Analysis. ABA is not meant to be used as a one-size fits all therapy. ABS BCBA's tend to not even recognize their clients' strengths nor deficits, and rarely see their in-home clients enough to realize when their programming has become entirely obsolete for the client's needs. I had clients with the majority of their goals MASTERED and yet weren't assigned new programming for months after the fact. It was just really sad. It felt like I was wasting the clients' time. And if you know anything about ABA or psychology, you know that this will lead to a DECLINE in progress for the clients. Just very sad.