behavior technician

behavioral therapist

senior occupational therapist

occupational therapist

mental health therapist

Wisconsin Early Autism Project

Wisconsin Early Autism Project was a very nice place to work. It it is an enjoyable job that allows you to learn a lot of very niche information very quickly and gives you the opportunity to strengthen skills that are integral to many other jobs. That being said, this is not the place for everyone. Positives of the job include very flexible daytime hours, good benefits for full-time employees and a relaxed dress code. Outside of these positives, there were a lot of negative aspects that ultimately informed my decision to leave. As a Behavioral Treatment Technician, you have a bulk of the workload with a child. Depending on the commitment of your team Therapist, you may not have enough guidance and treatment can often come to a standstill which can lead to behaviors that can fall on the family and the techs. Other Therapists are excellent at their jobs, very committed to their clients and spare a lot of time for overlapping.This is good for treatment plans, the clients and their families and good for your personal knowledge of overall goals. Overlapping, which has become a mainstay, is often pretty nerve-racking. 

You have to schedule in your own breaks for the day. Shifts can last as long as 8 hours. The company says that you are allowed to eat with the client during the client's breaks and/or mealtimes, but you are never off the clock and you do not stop working. If you schedule a full work-day, you may have to commute a lot to get to the hours you are open. A lot of your daily allotted time can be taken away by travel, which, although you are compensated for, isn't much unless you work full-time.

There are little protections for employees if clients cancel, which can happen quite often. The two options you have for making up hours are substitute tech, where you drive to a location and sub therapy for a client who is without a tech, or to hope for a client looking for hours nearby. Travel in those situations is often uncontrolled, hours are varied and you may not even have the opportunity if there is not a need. You also have the option for weekend club, but that is, clearly, on the weekend.

Environments vary very far and wide. You have control over allergies and smoking preferences, but you cannot really control the cleanliness of the clients house, whether or not you have to be all over their floor, the neighbors or areas you travel to and general working conditions.

The biggest struggle in this position is being a liaison from family to company. The Therapists have often said, if families knew exactly what to do, there would be no need for therapy. Families, good intentions aside, will often undermine behavioral training, expect more services than are given, have trouble understanding treatment plans and will abandon treatment when therapists are gone which creates regressions in a lot of behaviors that a team can be working on for months at a time.

You don't need any experience to work as a technician!! As a technician you work hands on with the clients and their families. It's a lot of fun being a kid again while implementing treatment. Technicians play with the kids, provide treatment, and companionship. You are constantly learning new skills every day. Each kid has their own team made up of a therapist and several technicians. Sometimes there might only be one technician on the team if they are taking the full hours.. The most rewarding part is seeing the kids progress in their treatment plans and seeing them grow up. Management in all levels is great and very responsive. My manager is amazing and always there when I need her. They work around your schedule as much as possible. I'm a full-time college student and have never had a problem with my schedules interfering with each other. There are advancement opportunities but most of them require college degrees. However, there are a few advancement opportunities at the Technician level that don't require college degrees, but they do require a certain amount of field hours within the company. You get paid by the hour, so how long you're with your client(s) each day. Example: if you work a 2 hour session, you only get paid for 2 hours. However, if you have two or more clients back to back, you also get paid for drive time (how long it takes you to drive from one session to the next one). You can make decent money depending on the length of sessions you have and the amount if clients you have. My staring wage was $13.25 with no experience. However, if you are already at max days and hours with one client, you can only pick up more time/sessions if you take on another client. I highly recommend working for WEAP if you want to get your foot in or some experience in the Psychology field. 

Personally, I joined WEAP because I wanted to get my foot through the door for other opportunities and I thought it would be very promising. Based on my personal experience, I was wrong. Firstly, there’s misinformation when it comes to pay; some postings will show between $17-20 an hour but in reality it’s between $14-16 starting. You will need to buy reinforcements with your own money because the kids can quickly become disengaged and it’s a hit or miss on whether or not they enjoy it. Trainings do not completely cover everything that is to be expected on the job and you will be a deer in headlights at times. A rehabilitation review is not required, all a criminal has to do is write a statement unless the crime is child-specific. In-home clients were very far and cancellations were frequent and not communicated well at times, which was frustrating. Gas compensation was almost nonexistent, and not provided for late client cancellations. The other technicians were some of the nicest people I ever met but management rarely had nice things to say about staff. I have never had a job in my life that was so overly-critical that it was not walking on eggshells, it was walking on lava. Unless you are actively working on becoming an RBT or higher (all the praise to you), I strongly advise to look elsewhere. The kids were the best part about the job and were the only reason I stayed as long as I did. But even then I was so burned out I ended up soft quitting and was worried about hindering their progress. 

I really learned a lot while I was here and even used some techniques to help teach kids I am in contact with at home. I will say that the staff is always supportive and I had friendly coworkers. Unfortunately, I would not recommend working here if you need consistent hours. Every week I had clients canceling, which I know we cannot control but there were no assistance to the techs when cancellations happened in terms of payment. Most times they will find sub hours for you sometimes there won't be sub hours so your paycheck gets affected. Oh, and if they find sub hours most times, at least for me, they were less hours than what I would've had if client had not cancelled. In the few months that I worked there I never got a full paycheck due to weekly client cancellations. Also, during holidays you do not get paid either which I thought was silly. The health insurance they offer was also a bit pricey. So imagine not only getting smaller paychecks due to cancellations but now even smaller paychecks due to the pricey health insurance they offer. During pandemic they also started offering less sub hours as well, so if a client canceled you pretty much were to go home. Also, I felt very micromanaged. Almost every week they go in to observe the clients, and they're also watching you. I get they need to see the client's progress but it just felt a bit much to be running a session with managers 2-3 a week. Also, you get no lunch time to yourself. You will be eating with the kids. 

Working with an autistic child can be challenging, but if you like kids and have a calm, patient temperament, it can also be very rewarding as well. I love working with my team, everyone listens to what each other has to say, and we all provide feedback and bond during our team meetings. Our senior therapist and other superiors treat us like equals and are very hardworking and friendly individuals. A typical shift for me is around 3 hours a day, and I only work with one family. While 3 hours isn't a lot, you definitely feel like you're working. The hours are flexible, which I love. The best part of the job is when your client is having a good day and makes visible progress -- it really leads to a swell of pride to think you helped them get that far. The worst part is when the child is having a bad day, either they're sick, in a bad mood, or are having trouble making progress, as it can be upsetting for both therapist and child. I have to say that this is the most enjoyable job I've ever had. In order to start as a basic line therapist, you only really need a high school diploma and be 18 with a desire to help autistic children, but it feels much more like a professional job than most other entry-level jobs with the same requirements. Also, the hourly wage is fairly decent and above minimum wage, but I don't really care so much about the money. Helping a child with special needs achieve things they normally couldn't without my help is good enough.

I have been with WEAP for almost 10 years and I have been able to advance in my role where i started as a BT and now I am a Managing Technician which means I am supervising my own kiddos and staff.  My day will consist of overlapping staff and kiddos and seeing where the kiddos may need help as well as the staff, this will include adding new programs and updating current programs. I will see what support staff will need to excel in their position and make sure that they are given the best tools to be successful and that they are given the opportunities to advance in their careers with either WEAP or elsewhere.  I have been asked by past staff to be their reference and I have been more than happy to do this for them.  I may also work one on one with kiddos meaning I will do programs and work the one on one with a kiddo.  The hardest part of my job is losing great staff, we become like family and kiddos can create a bond and its hard to start over with  new staff.  The best part of my job is when I see the success, when the kiddos are using communication and having less behaviors and are ready to go onto the next step of school without us.  My other favorite part is the joy that you bring to the caregivers of these kids, and how you also helped them navigate through this time. 

Working for WEAP was a great fun and learning experience for me. For me, it basically was not a job, but a place where you provided a very fun and safe atmosphere while promoting learning the entire time. A typical day would start off by reading notes left by the previous therapist, and getting materials for programs ready, while the child had a 15 minute down time period. After, we would start the session off with a little bit of interactive play and then progress to programs. We would continually switch off between the two, rotating back and fourth during the 2-3 hour session. About midway through the child would get a break and be allowed to do whatever they wanted to (as long as the parents allowed them), and after would resume therapy. We would always aim towards a goal to work for such as getting to play outside, getting ice cream, getting to watch a special movie, etc. I would only really see my co-workers during team meetings or during shift changes. The hardest part of my job was seeing a child really struggle with a particular program and kind of forcing them to keep at it and push through. The most enjoyable part of my day was to see that child accomplish that program. To see the light go off was a pretty amazing thing to witness, to see everything click, and see them get incredibly excited over doing so would definitely have to be the highlight of my day!

I love working with the kids. 
I love the relaxed atmosphere of working in the homes. 
Most of the management staff that I have worked with have been great. 
Pay is low for the job that techs do. 
We are in situations were we can be hit, kicked, bit, scratched when we have kiddos with more aggressive behaviors.  
The pay should be higher in my opinion
They do pay for travel which is great as you travel from home to home. 
The paid time off is different for in home techs compared to office.  Office staff receive holiday paid off where techs do not. Techs do not get a choice to be off for holidays if the families are off so they should get paid holidays just like the office staff.   Office staff and therapists and above receive more paid time off benefits and other benefits such as paid cell phone bills, where the techs do not even though they use their phones for payroll now and for various programs and keeping in touch with supervisors and other team members. 

There is advancement opportunities within the company.  

They do have a higher turn over rate but a lot of that is due to college attendees working as the work schedule is very flexible. Once school goes back in session, graduations happen, etc there is a turn over.  

Work Schedule is extremely flexible. Getting time off is fairly easy.  They do require you to make up hours however which can be very difficult. 
Overall it is a great place to work but I feel it is more geared to those attending college, or someone looking for more part time hours.

With WEAP, in my experience, there is a lot of collaboration between the techs and therapists, who are the techs’ supervisors pretty much, which is a good thing when it comes to programming and questions. However, I personally do not like being supervised so much on a job, and the therapist was there a lot of the time I was, which made the session harder as there was more distraction for the client. It also just makes me more nervous when I’m working. 
There also isn’t always hours and clients can cancel sessions as well, even at last minute. I once arrived at a house only to be told that they were canceling session to go somewhere fun that day. I wasn’t compensated for my driving time and lost those hours out of the few I had that week. 
I will say that it takes a certain type of person to work with children with a disability, especially if it is higher in severity. I found that it wasn’t my strength, and with the other things I’ve mentioned, I decided to leave WEAP. I think it could be a great place to work if you do not need a ton of hours, you like a lot of supervision, and you’re good at working with those that need you to keep their attention and have high energy all of the time. All of the staff I met were super friendly. If you have a problem with houses that aren’t the cleanest and going into peoples homes, this isn’t the job for you.

This is a rewarding Career in which you get the opportunity to change a child's life around.  There are some scheduling difficulties along with the positivity of flexibility in scheduling. The starting pay isn't the best for this type of job so I recommend this job to anyone who is looking to work only part time or is looking for a second job. In order to move on into the career you also need to have a college degree. 

This can also can be a physically and emotionally draining job. I believe taking breaks and balancing work and life is so important. You also have to learn how to deal with certain behaviors in a positive and calming manner. Having the opportunity to see your clients smiles and laughter on there face when engaging and playing with them is rewarding. Seeing progress and a change in your client is also so rewarding. This all takes lots of patience and guidance. Lots of positive reinforcement, redirection and love. This definitely is the job for you if you love kiddos, have patience and want to make a difference. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Behavior technician 3 salaries reported	$15.08 per hour
Behavioral therapist 2 salaries reported	$15.00 per hour
Senior occupational therapist 6 salaries reported	$87,500 per year
Occupational therapist 4 salaries reported	$70,000 per year
Mental health therapist 2 salaries reported	$72,500 per year

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