Only doing what you have been trained to do
Your credential says what you may do; training says what you should
- RBT
- BCaBA
- BCBA
What the obligation is
Both codes draw a line between what your certification permits and what you personally can do well. The second is always narrower, and it is the one that governs. For a technician this means delivering a procedure only after being trained on it and shown to perform it correctly — which in practice means instructions, a demonstration, practice, and feedback until you meet a standard. For an analyst it means the same applied to populations, settings and procedures: experience with young children in homes does not make you competent with adults who have feeding disorders. Building competence in a new area is allowed and expected; doing it on a client without training or supervision is not.
In plain language
Do only what you have been trained and checked on. Your certificate says what you may do. Your training says what you can do well. Ask before you try something new.
What this looks like
- A new procedure appears in a plan, and you ask to be trained on it before the next session.
- You say plainly that you have never run a preference assessment of that type.
- An analyst gets supervision from a specialist before accepting a case outside their experience.
- You practise a procedure in a role play before doing it with a learner.
Where people get caught
- Reading about a procedure and counting that as training.
- Running something unfamiliar because the supervisor wrote it, as if authorship transferred competence.
- Quietly skipping the part of a plan you are unsure about, which is both an unauthorised change and a documentation problem.
- Assuming competence with one learner transfers to a learner who is nothing like them.
If you are not sure
Tell your supervisor which specific step you have not been trained on, and ask for a demonstration and a practice round. Supervisors expect this; it is a much smaller conversation than an incident report.
In the codes
- RBT Ethics Code (2.0) Section 1 — How you conduct yourself
- 1.03 Practise only in a defined role, under close supervision
- 1.05 Do not overstate your qualifications
- 1.06 Work only where your supervisor has confirmed you are competent
- RBT Ethics Code (2.0) Section 2 — How you deliver services
- 2.04 Do not use unfamiliar procedures or work with unfamiliar populations
- Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts Section 1 — Your conduct as a professional
- 1.04 Define your role in writing before you start
- 1.05 Practise inside your scope of competence
- 1.06 Keep your competence current
On the exam
Terms used here
Situations where this comes up
Related topics
Written from
- bacb-rbt-ethics-code-2 — Competence
- bacb-ethics-code-2022 — Competence
- parsons-rollyson-reid-2012
Written from both codes' competence standards and the staff-training literature (Parsons, Rollyson and Reid, 2012), in our own words.
This entry has not yet been through independent review. Treat it as a draft, and read the official code for anything that matters.