New Jersey DSP Training Requirements: DDD Core Competencies & CDS

New Jersey rebuilt its training requirements for direct support professionals (DSPs) around a competency-based career pathway, and the new rules apply to DSPs and supervisors hired on or after January 1, 2025. Much of the required training runs through the College of Direct Support (CDS), which is why so many New Jersey DSPs and managers search for it by name.

This guide walks through what the Division of Developmental Disabilities (DDD) requires, when each piece is due, what CDS is and how it fits, and what your training records should show. It's based on DDD's provider guide, Implementing the New DSP Training Standards (revised January 22, 2025).

Who the new requirements cover

The requirements apply to agency-employed DSPs and supervisors who provide these DDD services:

• Behavioral Supports
• Career Planning
• Community Based Supports
• Community Inclusion Services
• Day Habilitation
• Individual Supports
• Prevocational Training
• Respite
• Supported Employment (individual and group)
• Supports Brokerage

Self-directed employees have narrower requirements. All of them must complete the new Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse training, and those who need medication training must take the new medication course.

Staff hired before January 1, 2025, had until December 31, 2025, to finish a shorter list of new courses, such as Person Centered Planning, DSP Professionalism and Everyone Can Communicate. If they had already completed some of these courses through CDS or the pre-2016 Pre-Service Training, they didn't have to retake them.

The eight competency domains

DDD built the requirements around eight core competency domains recommended by a stakeholder committee:

1. Safety
2. Supporting Health and Wellness
3. Documentation
4. Communication
5. Cultural and Linguistic Competence
6. Empowerment, Advocacy, and Rights
7. Positive Behavior Support and Crisis Prevention and Intervention
8. Professionalism and Ethics

Each required training is mapped to one or more of these domains.

What is the College of Direct Support?

DDD describes CDS as "an independent online learning management system that delivers and documents completion of multiple training modules" for DSPs, frontline supervisors and other disability service professionals. Approved DDD providers get access at no cost and must have at least two CDS administrators. CDS is administered statewide by The Boggs Center on Disability and Human Development at Rutgers. DDD's guide to assigning CDS training bundles explains how agency administrators assign the required modules.

DDD lists 20 mandatory onboarding trainings through CDS, including:

• DDD Life Threatening Emergencies (Danielle's Law)
• DDD Stephen Komninos' Law
• DDD Incident Reporting Overview
• Medication Online Training
• Prevention of Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation (PANE)
• Understanding and Preventing Life Threatening Health Conditions
• DDD Service Documentation Requirements and Medicaid Fraud, Waste and Abuse
• Universal Precautions, HIPAA, Person Centered Planning, Cultural and Linguistic Competence and others

For ten of these topics, DDD allows a formal Alternate Pathway: a provider can submit its own curriculum and competency tests to DDD for approval, and DDD says it will reply by email within 30 days. DDD also authorizes certain other trainings for some topics. The DDD-developed modules, such as Danielle's Law, Stephen Komninos' Law and incident reporting, are taken on CDS.

The training timeline

DDD's quick reference guide sets deadlines by milestone. Here are the main ones.

Before working with individuals

• DDD Life Threatening Emergencies (about 0.5 hours, CDS)
• DDD Stephen Komninos' Law (about 0.5 hours, CDS)
• Incident Reporting (about 0.5 hours, CDS), plus a documented review of agency procedures
• Provider-developed orientation covering the agency's mission, personnel policies, service plans and documentation

Before giving medications

• The six-module CDS medication course
• An on-site, in-person medication practicum with a trained, experienced supervisor or trainer, before giving medications and annually after that

Before sole responsibility for anyone, or within 60 days of hire

• PANE training (about 2 hours, CDS) plus an on-site PANE competency assessment
• CPR and First Aid certification from a nationally accredited source that follows current Emergency Cardiovascular Care guidelines, renewed every two years
• Specialized training on the needs of each person served
• Provider-developed basic safety and fire evacuation and emergency procedures training
• Understanding and Preventing Life Threatening Health Conditions (about 2 hours), covering choking, aspiration, seizures, dehydration and more

Later milestones

Every year

• Full-time staff (30 or more hours a week): 12 hours of professional development per calendar year
• Part-time staff (fewer than 30 hours a week): 6 hours per calendar year

DDD says mandated trainings, orientation, seminars, in-service sessions, CDS courses and conferences all count toward these hours.

Provider-developed training

Not everything comes from CDS. Agencies must build their own orientation, person-specific training, basic safety training and fire evacuation and emergency procedures training, each with minimum curriculum requirements set out in Section 4 of DDD's guide. For people with higher medical needs, specialized training must come from a qualified expert, such as a registered nurse, or from a trainer using an approved curriculum.

What your training records should show

With requirements tied to different milestones and clocks, New Jersey compliance comes down to tracking. For each DSP, keep:

• Hire date, which drives the 60-, 90-, 120- and 180-day deadlines
• CDS transcripts for each required module
• Documentation of on-site competency assessments, including PANE and medication practicums
• CPR and First Aid certification dates and expiration dates
• Approved alternate trainings and provider-developed trainings, with dates and content
• Annual professional development hours by calendar year
• Annual Universal Precautions retraining

For provider-developed training, DDD says acceptable proof of completion is a training certificate with the training title, date and trainee's name, kept in the personnel file.

DDD also says providers must be able to show, on request, documentation that their CPR and First Aid training source follows current Emergency Cardiovascular Care guidelines.

How TES can help

TES offers a New Jersey DSP compliance pathway that maps New Jersey's requirements, so you can see what each staff member has completed, what's still due and what needs renewing. It treats the state-delivered CDS modules as external evidence: staff complete them on the state platform, and you track them alongside everything else. It doesn't replace CDS.

Our New Jersey DSP requirements page gives a summary of the rules. For annual professional development hours, the TES course catalog includes DSP courses such as Person Centered Planning for Direct Support Professionals and Incident Management. Confirm with DDD's guide and your own policies how each course counts. New to the field? Read our overview of direct support professionals.

This guide summarizes DDD's provider guide as revised January 22, 2025. Requirements can change, so check DDD's current guidance and the DDD policy manuals before making training or staffing decisions.