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- October 6, 2023
Building Meaningful Careers: Exploring Opportunities at Waypoints
One of our guiding principles at Waypoints is that the best client outcomes are derived from well-compensated and well-trained staff. As our CEO David Bergmark described in our company’s origin story, Waypoints was established with the goal of prioritizing the wellbeing of our employees. This is especially important for our behavior technicians, who are all too often overworked and underappreciated in the field of ABA.
Our accreditation by the Behavioral Health Center for Excellence (BHCOE) has provided excellent frameworks to help ensure that we maintain our focus on and meet that goal as our company grows. For example, the BHCOE has affirmed that we “support continuing education and credential maintenance needs of staff in line with their certification,” as well as “provide enhanced education opportunities to staff appropriate to their specific areas of need.”
In this blog post, we’re excited to showcase the diverse and meaningful career opportunities available at Waypoints. By highlighting what makes working with us unique, we hope to inspire readers who are passionate about supporting skill development for autistic youth to consider joining our team!
Pursuing a Career in ABA
A career in applied behavior analysis (ABA) might involve designing and overseeing skill acquisition programs, assisting in their implementation with clients, supervising y training others – or a combination of these roles! For a more detailed exploration of the common responsibilities of behavior technicians and clinicians, check out our past blog post at this link.
As our company has grown, we have diversified employee roles in order to better support their personal career goals. To highlight a few:
- Todos behavior technicians who join our team complete a standardized 40-hour training about ABA, followed by approximately 30 more hours of additional training, shadowing, and hands-on practice before working independently with clients. At this level, technicians are responsible for implementing programs and collecting data. Explore what a typical session at Waypoints looks like with one of our dedicated technicians, Kiersten, in her insightful blog post.
- Any technician has the opportunity to become a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) and earn a raise in the process. RBTs receive intensive training to help them prepare for their certification exams and annual recertification. The advanced expertise associated with certification allows RBTs to assist with training, mentoring, and assessing other technicians. For more detailed information on the certification paths for both technicians and clinicians, you can explore yet another of our past blog posts at this link..
- While not all technicians choose the path to becoming clinicians, it’s a common career progression. One requirement for becoming a Analista de comportamiento certificado por la junta (BCBA) is completing fieldwork. In addition to the responsibilities noted above, technicians who log fieldwork hours also gradually take on clinical roles by assisting with client assessments, program development, data analysis, and case conceptualization, all under the close supervision of an experienced BCBA.
- Technicians may also be interested in taking on more administrative duties, such as helping to onboard new clients and employees, creating materials used during sessions, or even managing our social media accounts. (Big shout out to Allena for taking care of our Facebook y Instagram, and Andrea for our LinkedIn!) If there’s a task at our company that you’re interested in learning more about, chances are we can create an opportunity for you to get hands-on experience with it.
Learning Opportunities on the Job
At Waypoints, our company culture emphasizes communication and collaboration, and you’ll see this reflected in our day-to-day operations. In addition to the standard training provided to all of our employees as mentioned earlier, we continually share learning opportunities among our team members. Moreover, we actively support our employees in taking advantage of those opportunities – this includes paid time for training related to client support and reimbursement of costs for general professional development.
This year, we’ve had the pleasure of attending Assent Con and the Black Applied Behavior Analysts conference as a group. Attending conferences becomes even more rewarding when we can reflect and learn together! Additionally, we maintain a shared company chat where we regularly post about continuing education events.
As Waypoints’ Training Director, one of my personal goals is to regularly invite external experts to share their knowledge with our team. So far, this has included consultation on development of our website and strategic plan, a Q&A session with science communicator Dr. Jey McCreight, workshops for our clinicians, and a blog post sharing valuable resources from autistic voices written by the fantastic Lauren Neely.
[H2] Join our Team!
A career in ABA can have a profound impact on both our autistic clients and their families, as well as on ourselves as technicians and clinicians. Facilitating and witnessing the progress and accomplishments of the people we work with, clients and coworkers alike, makes all of the hard work well worth the while.
If you’d like to look into joining our team, you guessed it, we have a blog post for that too! Check out How to Get Hired at Waypoints, or reach out to us to start a conversation at info@waypoints.life.
“I feel so excited to be working with you all on my goals! It is refreshing and reassuring to have SO much positivity, excitement, and support!”
“My supervisor has been amazing at answering questions in a comprehensive way, and I feel that I’ve been more supported here than any other company I’ve worked with.”
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Ya sea que esté buscando pruebas de diagnóstico, terapia AAC personalizada en el hogar y recursos para el desarrollo de habilidades, o simplemente desea obtener más información sobre nuestro enfoque único, ¡no dude en comunicarse con nosotros! (Nos encanta recibir correo).