A Day in the Life of an Senior Behaviour Technician

For a Senior Behaviour Technician (SBT), every day at work can be completely different! We see a range of clients, travel to homes and schools as well as Super Kids HQ, attend meetings and supervision, and prepare individualised materials and toys for fun and productive sessions. But typically, we spend the majority of our time in 1:1 sessions with clients implementing the programs designed by Behaviour Consultants. We’ll often have 3 sessions a day, usually each 2 to 2.5 hours long, and we will typically see the same clients 1 to 3 times a week. Essentially, we love spending lots of time with our learners practicing their programs, expanding their play, and seeing their progress!

During sessions, we are putting lots of energy into engaging our clients with fun play and social interactions to keep them happy, relaxed and engaged (HRE). This way we can mix up their less-preferred learning and skill building without the session becoming too difficult or unenjoyable. You’ll see us singing songs, commenting enthusiastically on their play, adding value to their favourite activities and getting excited at their successes! At the same time, our brains are busy planning the best ways to next practise and develop their skills. This might involve some problem solving and getting creative with setting up naturalistic opportunities for practice. And lastly, alonging with playing, teaching skills, and problem-solving, we also take detailed data so we, our BC’s and even the learners themselves can know how successful they’re being!

Whilst we do spend most of our time face-to-face (or online!) with our clients, there’s also a lot we do behind the scenes. Before each session, we review the detailed programs our BC’s have written, to ensure we are running everything correctly and consistently for each individual client, and incorporate any updates as our learners progress. We also prepare learning materials and put effort into setting up the room with our learners’ favourite toys and activities! We also don’t shy away from messy play and as much as possible follow the child’s lead throughout the session, and keep our attention all for them. This makes for a super fun and productive session, but it can mean quite a lot of clean up at the end! We take great care to keep HQ and with toys all put back in the right place for future sessions and different clients, so everyone can easily continue sharing in the fun. We also use our pack away time at the end of session to enter our data for each program, to ensure the ABA principles of evidence-based, data-driven decision making and implementation can occur to a high standard.

With all this in mind, it’s important that a day in the life of a SBT includes breaks too! Our sessions are high energy, and it’s often a lot of sensory input for therapists too. We love spending time with kids, but we certainly need our lunch break to ensure we can recharge for another high-energy but usually completely different session later that day! Sometimes this may be a walk down to the local coffee shop or having a chat at the lunch table.

Finally, we also spend time in team meetings and supervision, to ensure our team-based work is consistent and to brainstorm together how to run our programs most successfully for each of our individual learners. There is also a lot of scheduling and emails that go along with a flexible, session-based work day! We also really value professional development at Super Kids, and will spend time up-skilling and reading the latest research to ensure our practice is consistently up to date with best practice. We also use our admin time to prepare a vast array of individualised materials such as flashcards and datasheets. And when we’re not doing any of these things, you might find us at Kmart shopping for new toys!

If this sounds like something you’d love to do too or learn more about the role of a Behaviour Technician, Senior Behaviour Technician or Behaviour Consultant, apply here.