The mechanism
The system
measures
attendance.
Here is the actual standard. For an asynchronous continuing education event, the BACB requires the provider to verify that you were present and participating — in practice, by asking you at least three questions per CEU. That is the floor a compliant CEU has to clear.
Read it again, because it is not a criticism of the BACB. It is a description of what a credentialing body can reasonably verify at scale. Nobody can audit whether your Tuesday changed. So the requirement lands where it can land: on attendance and recall.
Then the market optimizes against the measure, the way markets do. If the metric is hours attended, the cheapest way to produce a CEU is a recorded talk and a short quiz. That is not a conspiracy. It is a reinforcement schedule, and we are a field that should recognize one when we see it.
The result is an industry where the product is the certificate, and the education is a by-product.
Meanwhile the thing you actually needed — a way to make next week's supervision better, a protocol your technician can run, an ethics decision made before the pressure arrives — was never on the test.
What we already know
We train staff
better than
we train
ourselves.
Ask any BCBA how to teach a technician a new skill and you will get the right answer in about four seconds: instruction, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, repeated until performance meets criterion. Behavioral skills training. It is one of the most reliably supported procedures in the field.1
We insist on it for a twenty-year-old learning to run a paired-stimulus preference assessment. Then we go get our own continuing education by watching a video at 1.5× speed while answering email.
There is no version of the evidence in which that works. Instruction alone changes what people can describe. It does not reliably change what they do. We know this, we have known it for decades, and we built a continuing education market that ignores it entirely.
Skillforge is what happens if you take the field's own evidence about training seriously and apply it to the people doing the training.
1. Parsons, M. B., Rollyson, J. H., & Reid, D. H. (2012). Evidence-based staff training: A guide for practitioners. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 5(2), 2–11.
Our terms
Four commitments, and the way to hold us to each one.
Every course produces an artifact
If you finish and have nothing you could hand to a technician on Monday, we designed it wrong.
Hold us to it: The artifact is named on the course page before you pay.
Every course makes you rehearse
Passive completion is not available. Build steps gate the sections; live workshops score your rehearsal.
Hold us to it: Try to finish one with the tab in the background.
Every course gets checked at 30 days
A short fidelity measure, sent to you a month later, about the thing you built.
Hold us to it: It arrives whether or not you want it to.
Every course can be returned
If it changed nothing, it failed at its only job and you should not pay for it.
Hold us to it: Thirty days, one email, no form.