Before the Interview
Before you even reach out to your first prospective employer, there is one concept you need to familiarize yourself with that typically is not always covered in grad school:
Billable Hours
This is one of the most confusing concepts for brand new BCBAs. Billable hours refers to the time you spend delivering services that you bill insurance for
If you work for a clinic or an in-home company, these services may include supervising therapists and clients, conducting parent training, and writing treatment plans. If any of these things seem daunting, not to worry. The BCBA Basics series covers everything you'll need to know before starting supervision, parent training, and assessments.
If you are hired by a school district, you won't typically find yourself billing insurance at all and this may not come up in conversation with your future employer.
Part of your job responsibilities will include non-billable duties such as admin and general paperwork. This means you will not complete a full 40 hours of billable work each week. A healthy, reasonable amount of billable hours per week will be closer to 20-25 billable hours.
When considering job offers, it is strongly recommended that you don't accept anything over 30 billable hours per week. Doing so will more likely than not lead to 40+ hour work weeks and minimal work/life balance.
Worried About Work-Life Balance
?
Visit the Behavioral Basics’ online shop to browse digital fieldwork trackers to help you stay organized from day 1.
Preparing for the Interview
You will want to make a list of different companies that you intend on interviewing with. It can be tempting to stop the interview process once you receive your first offer, but it helps to have all your options on the table before making such a big decision. This is going to be where you learn the hands-on, clinical skills of being a BCBA, after all.
If you know which setting you want to work at, such as a clinic or an in-home company, look around the area and find three to five companies that serve in that setting. If you're undecided about where you want to practice, then select a couple of companies that offer services in each setting. Don't forget to consider school districts who hire BCBAs to visit their schools as needed.
You also want to consider whether or not you want to pursue a salaried position. Salary positions as a BCBA offer more stability with a consistent paycheck typically every two weeks as well as benefits. If you are not concerned about working for benefits, such as health insurance, then you may want to consider part-time. Part-time positions are typically more flexible than salaried positions, and they usually offer more per hour than you would make as a salary to BCBA.
What Else Should I Consider?
One question that helped me discern which companies were good options and which ones weren’t worth my time was asking them how they train someone completely new to ABA to be a behavior technician.
Even though you are applying for a position as a BCBA, you will benefit from joining an organization that values all their employees and equips their technicians for the most difficult aspect of ABA: direct work.
How a company onboards, trains, and assesses their technicians will tell you a lot about how the company operates as a whole.
You can take this one step further and ask your interviewer how they onboard a brand new BCBA. After all, if you choose to accept their offer, that will be you.
