What is a Direct Support Professional?

Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) provide guidance and support to people who need help to be self-sufficient. DSPs provide this support to a wide range of individuals including people with physical, psychiatric, or cognitive disabilities or chronic illness; children and youth who are at risk; and families who need assistance in supporting family members. Many DSPs view their job as a profession that demands complex skills and knowledge, ethical judgment, and the ability to create long-term relationships of trust and mutual respect.

DSPs are found in hundreds of different settings with various job titles such as Residential Counselor, Employment Specialist, Family Advocate, and Personal Support Assistant. Many of these jobs share similar requirements and approaches including the ability to teach life skills, provide physical assistance, and to support the empowerment, choices and self-direction of the individual receiving supports. It is estimated that there are over 2 million Americans working in these roles.

Entry level work in direct support typically requires a high school diploma, a driver’s license and no criminal record. Brief classroom training followed by on the job training (OJT) is the typical route in which DSPs are trained. Unfortunately, the training provided is highly variable with no standard measure of quality. Long-term training to enhance and develop advanced, high performance skills, knowledge, and attitudes, which are needed to achieve the outcomes expected in many human service settings, is rare.

The College of Direct Support (CDS) recognizes the need for DSPs to have easy access to high quality training opportunities built on established competencies and ethical guidelines, and that provide usable information necessary to do the job more effectively, while working toward advanced skills. CDS courses are infused with the Community Support Skill Standards (a set of nationally validated competencies for community human service practitioners) and an established set of ethical guidelines for direct support professionals. The courses are competency based and provide further opportunity for assessment and development of skills after the on-line training is done. In these ways, the CDS supports the direct support professional.

*Much of the text in this section is excerpted from the NADSP fact sheet: The Direct Support Workforce by Marianne Taylor, Human Services Research Institute.