Kristen Byra Built Upskill ABA Around the Gap Between Certification and Competence

The summer job that changed her direction

SHARON, CONNECTICUT – Kristen Byra was an undergraduate psychology student when a summer job placed her beside a three-year-old who was not speaking, drank from a bottle, and spent much of his day walking. The instructions she received were simple: keep him safe and take him on walks.

“He just started, and he doesn’t eat food, he drinks from a bottle, he doesn’t talk, and he likes to go for walks. Like, okay, but what do I do? And they’re like, well, just make sure he doesn’t run away and take him on walks.”

Byra began applying ideas from a behavior modification class. She waited for moments when he wanted something, encouraged a sound before giving him access to it, and found new ways to engage him with toys and books.

“I may have, thinking back, started trying to use some of those behavior modification principles that I learned in my class, and pretty soon we are playing with blocks and toys and looking at books.”

The change surprised the people around her. It also sent Byra back to a professor with a new question: how could she become a behavior analyst?

A wider reach through decision support

Byra earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology from Western Michigan University, then worked in school district consultation. She became certified in August 2007, when she recalls the field had roughly 3,500 BCBAs. The Behavior Analyst Certification Board reported 85,587 BCBAs as of July 2026.

After clinical leadership, she spent roughly a decade at a decision-modeling company serving insurers and providers. She founded Upskill ABA on Jan. 1, 2024, as a management services organization and software-as-a-service company. Clinicians use the decision models she develops. They do not build their own models through the platform.

“I left clinical practice to try and be able to scale better quality. I couldn’t clone myself, but I could help more people make better informed decisions.”

Upskill ABA also provides fractional clinical and quality consulting to smaller agencies. Byra is licensed in Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, and North Carolina and serves on Arizona’s Committee on Behavior Analysts, which advises the state psychology board on behavior analyst regulation.

“People talk about burnout. I don’t think it’s because we’re asking them to do too much. I think we’re asking them to do things they’re not really trained to do.” – Kristen Byra, founder, Upskill ABA (2026)

Burnout as a training mismatch

Byra’s central argument challenges the field’s familiar workload explanation for burnout. She believes overwhelm often begins when a clinician is assigned a caseload outside their scope of competence without meaningful support.

“Here’s a kid, I’ve only worked with the five-and-under crew, and here’s the 12-year-old and they just need social skills, and I’ve never taught that. Well, no wonder you’re burnt out; you’re trying to now manage someone completely outside of your scope with no support.”

That mismatch matters because the credential can be treated as proof of readiness for independent practice. Byra compares certification to receiving a driver’s license. Passing the test does not make a new driver ready for every road.

“There are big gaps between getting your license and being a super confident, independent driver, where you would feel comfortable doing a cross-country trip on your own. And that’s really what it looks like in practice.”

Too often, she said, the transition is immediate: “The day you pass your exam, they’re like, ‘Boop.’ Here’s a case for you, go to it.’”

Her preferred alternative looks like behavioral skills training: explain the skill, model it, rehearse it, and release responsibility when the clinician can perform it. She does not believe mentorship should end after a fixed number of years.

“I still would request mentorship with certain populations and challenging behaviors, because they’re just not in my wheelhouse. And I’ve been doing it for almost half my life now. So I don’t think the need for support just vanishes because you’ve hit some kind of milestone in your career.”

Ten data points instead of five lost months

The Red Dot progress-monitoring model shows how Byra is trying to turn that philosophy into daily infrastructure. At the end of a session, a technician can flag a skill that is not progressing. The software alerts the supervisor and guides that person through possible corrective steps.

Byra said she often sees a goal’s lack of progress addressed only during reassessment, shortly before reauthorization. By then, she said, a clinician may insert a phase change line to explain why the goal was not mastered after months of missed learning opportunities.

“That’s five months of wasted learning opportunities that we’re saying, sorry, we messed up. Please provide more funds for the next authorization. We’re going to do it better.”

Her standard is to review progress after 10 data points, a threshold she said is based on the published literature, at two sessions per day, that creates a decision point after about one week. The model then helps the supervisor examine motivation, implementation fidelity, instructional modality, and temporal patterns.

“The goal of that decision model is to be like a sit-down-next-to mentor basically.”

Upskill ABA’s other models address preference assessment selection, communication modality, and outcome measures. Byra says she traces decision points to professional guidelines, the BACB Ethics Code, and peer-reviewed literature, then embeds the reasoning in the software. Byra co-authored a 2024 book chapter about the theory of treatment-intensity decision modeling, but that work is not an Upskill ABA product.

Mentorship without a price gate

The clearest evidence of Byra’s mentorship work sits outside the paid platform. She runs a free online community for BCBAs, RBTs, and parents, offering at least one free CEU each month. Recordings remain available without charge. Weekly roundtables give members space to bring current clinical and organizational problems, including how to move a quality initiative forward when colleagues resist it.

She also offers a free Clinical Quality Survey that returns results and resources for areas it flags. When BCBAs ask how to evaluate a prospective employer, she tells them to ask the organization to complete it.

“I have told them to get their potential employer to fill it out, and if they won’t, then that’s a huge red flag.”

Her larger advice is to look beyond salary and paid time off long enough to ask who will teach the practical parts of the job. New BCBAs should ask who will help them learn CPT codes, navigate the practice management system, and determine whether an assigned case falls within their scope of competence.

“You need to interview where you want to work way harder than they’re interviewing you to work there.” – Kristen Byra, founder, Upskill ABA (2026)

For Byra, that conversation is not separate from burnout or quality. It is where both can begin. A credential may open the door, but competence grows through supported practice, honest limits, and mentors who stay close enough to help when the road changes.

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