Fieldwork Overview and Documentation Mindset

The Two Hour Options

There are two current fieldwork routes. Supervised Fieldwork requires 2,000 hours. Concentrated Supervised Fieldwork requires 1,500 hours. The lower concentrated total is not a discount — it is paid for with higher supervision intensity each month.

Do not treat the two routes as interchangeable hour totals you can mix freely. Each route sets its own per-month requirements for contacts (how often the supervisor meets with you) and the supervision percentage (the share of your fieldwork hours that must be supervised). Choosing concentrated means accepting more frequent, more intensive oversight in exchange for fewer total hours.

The most testable trap here is the assumption that fewer hours means an easier path. On an exam item, the correct read is that concentrated fieldwork trades hour count for supervision intensity, so a candidate who cannot meet the higher monthly contact and percentage requirements should not assume the 1,500-hour route is simpler.

The Monthly Supervisory Period

A supervisory period is one calendar month. This is the single most consequential structural fact in fieldwork because contacts and supervision percentages are evaluated per period, not only against a final grand total. A month that falls short of its contact or percentage requirement does not get "averaged out" by a strong month later.

That is why a candidate who waits until the end to reconcile records can discover a non-compliant month that is impossible to fix retroactively. The supervision had to happen that month; you cannot retroactively add contacts to a past period.

Treat this table as a study aid and verify exact current figures against the Handbook before relying on them for your own application.

Individual Supervision And Unrestricted Activities

Two proportion rules sit on top of the monthly requirements. First, at least 50% of supervised hours must be individual supervision (one-on-one or small-group oversight, as defined by the Handbook), rather than all group supervision. Second, at least 60% of total fieldwork must be unrestricted activities.

Unrestricted activities are the core behavior-analytic tasks that build a professional repertoire — assessment, program design, analyzing data, adjusting interventions, training others — as opposed to restricted activities like delivering direct, often repetitive implementation. The 60% floor exists to ensure you graduate with analytic skill, not just service hours.

These are total-fieldwork expectations, so monitor the balance from day one. A plan that piles up restricted hours early can force a painful correction later, because you must then accumulate a disproportionate share of unrestricted hours to recover the 60% ratio. On the exam, watch for distractors that count total hours but quietly ignore the individual-supervision floor or the unrestricted percentage.

Restricted Versus Unrestricted, In Practice

Because the 60% unrestricted floor trips up many candidates, it helps to anchor the distinction with concrete examples rather than the labels alone.

Unrestricted activities build the analytic repertoire the credential certifies:

• Conducting and interpreting behavior assessments (preference assessments, functional behavior assessments).
• Designing and modifying behavior-change programs from data.
• Graphing and analyzing data to make treatment decisions.
• Training and supervising technicians or caregivers on procedures.

Restricted activities are valuable but more repetitive direct-service tasks — for instance, delivering one-to-one implementation of an existing protocol. They count toward total hours but are capped by the 60% rule so your fieldwork does not become pure technician work.

The practical risk is front-loading: many trainees start in heavy direct-service roles, accumulating restricted hours fast. If you reach the midpoint at, say, 30% unrestricted, you must then spend almost every remaining hour on unrestricted work to climb back to 60%. The fix is to negotiate unrestricted opportunities early with your supervisor and to track the running ratio every month, not just the running total.

The Documentation Mindset

Strong fieldwork documentation is timely, consistent, and tied to the official requirements. For each calendar month, track total hours, supervised hours, number of supervisor contacts, the individual-supervision proportion, and the unrestricted-activity percentage. The record should be easy for a reviewer to audit at a glance.

The failure mode is reconstruction from memory after many months. Memory cannot reliably regenerate per-month contact counts or activity classifications, and inventing records to fill a gap is both an integrity violation and a likely application failure.

A few habits keep you compliant:

• Log the same week the work happens, while you can still classify activities accurately.
• Reconcile each month before it closes, so a shortfall is caught while it can still be corrected.
• Resolve ambiguity with the Handbook and your supervisor, not with a guess you record as fact.
• Keep the file audit-ready — your documentation supports the application, supervision decisions, and ethical accountability all at once.

This mindset also previews Domain I (Personnel Supervision and Management), which the exam weights at 11%. The same record-keeping rigor you apply to your own fieldwork is what you will later be tested on as a supervisor of trainees — accurate monthly tracking, defined individual-supervision contacts, and honest documentation are professional obligations on both sides of the supervisory relationship.