Unfortunately, as ABACS grew, things began to go downhill.
Management/ staff- People I used to be able to contact for guidance were eventually unreachable (you could only contact Brandon by first making an appointment). The staff (on all levels) was very ‘cliquey’.
Home Sessions- The programming being run in home sessions was usually in disarray and you were discouraged from making your own stimuli (token boards, visuals) even though you had to wait weeks for the BCBA on your case to get back to you. The amount of supervision overlaps I received was completely unethical and definitely did not meet the BACB requirements.
BT Role- The BT's were not included in anything more than the data collection. There was no graphing and I was never given any information from progress reports on how things were going (parents would come to me and tell me). I don’t ever remember having a supervisor I could go to for guidance. I had BCBA’s that were on my cases (that showed for overlaps maybe once a month), but never any direct supervisor.
Feedback- As ABACS got bigger, they started doing this feedback form with different areas of performance which was rated on a scale of 1-5. It was frustrating; because no matter how much of my ‘A-game’ I brought, and how much extra items/ideas I brought into sessions from my own money/brainstorming (games, stickers, etc), they would NEVER give you a 5. I was told from one of the BCBA’s at the time that they were told they couldn’t give fives or they’d get in trouble. Aside from the fact that there was no possible way to score a 5, these forms were completed at random by whatever BCBA was on your case at the time. A couple times I had someone completely new to the company come in and ‘rate me’ whom I had just met. If you ask me, that’s a bit insulting after having worked at the company for 5 years. What saddened me the most, was that when I finally made the decision to leave the company, no one questioned why I was leaving or did anything to try to get me to stay after working there for all those years. There was no exit interview.
Social Skills Groups- The social skills groups were very stressful. You were paired with a child and had to arrive, say, at 3pm and the child arrives at the same time. They expected you to have somehow already set up your data sheets and gotten the area set up for projects/ect. This same thing happened at the end of the groups; your client was to be picked up at, say 6pm, and you had to somehow write up parent reports and clean up the office area and go speak to parents all by 6pm. It never worked that way, and we were made to feel bad when we asked for extra time prior to, and at the end of groups to get these things done. As an aside to all this, there was also always a ‘group leader’. The group leader had to do all of the above in addition to leading the group and they had their own 1:1 client they were responsible for at the same time. Sometimes the client you were working with had behaviors that made it nearly impossible to respond appropriately to the child as while you were also trying to run the group.
Final thoughts and words of advice – I’m not writing this just to badmouth the company. I am just speaking from experience. It is also important that I point out that this was a couple of years ago, so hopefully things have gotten better since. I began using glassdoor not too long ago and I have been contemplating posting this since. I don’t have any of the strong feelings I had when I first left the company, but I feel like others have a right to know what I went through, and then they can make their own decisions.
