Direct support professional training in Alaska is regulated by the Division of Senior and Disabilities Services (SDS), now housed in the Alaska Department of Health, under 7 AAC 130.220 and the Home and Community-Based Services Conditions of Participation (COP-06, adopted through 7 AAC 160.900). These rules apply to agencies certified to deliver HCBS waiver services — including services for Alaskans with intellectual and developmental disabilities — and make the provider agency, not the state, responsible for defining and documenting what its direct service workers must know.

Alaska does not mandate a statewide hour count for initial DSP training. Instead, under 7 AAC 130.220 and COP-06, each certified provider must define the required skill set for its direct service workers and deliver documented orientation plus any training necessary for the services the agency furnishes. The state points providers to the Alaska Core Competencies for direct care workers as a ready-made framework, but its use is optional ("may use") — an agency may adopt its own competency model so long as training is documented and matches the services delivered.

Ongoing requirements are concrete even without an annual hour mandate. Direct service workers must hold current CPR and First Aid certification, renewed every two years. Critical incident reporting training is also required every two years: SDS provides the course, and agencies may cascade it through a train-the-trainer model — though administrators must complete the SDS course directly. Compliance is verified through certification reviews, so training records need to be audit-ready.

Medication support is handled through a policy-approval mechanism rather than a state class. A provider whose staff assist with self-administration of medication (ASAM) must submit its medication training policy to SDS, covering the topic areas in 7 AAC 130.227(j)(2). The agency may build its own curriculum or use materials from the Alaska Training Cooperative — what SDS approves is the provider's training policy, not a specific vendor catalog.

The delivery model is genuinely open. Alaska has no state-run DSP curriculum, no state learning platform, and no vendor lock: providers choose their own training source for orientation, core competency training, and medication assistance content. The only state-delivered piece is the small critical incident reporting course, which agencies can cascade internally. For a certified agency, the real compliance burden is designing a defensible training plan and proving, worker by worker, that it was completed on time.

Training and eTracking Solutions provides online DSP training built for exactly this kind of provider-defined mandate — competency-based courses covering the orientation and direct-support topics Alaska agencies must document, mapped to recognized frameworks like the Alaska Core Competencies, with automatic tracking of two-year CPR/First Aid and critical incident reporting cycles and documentation that stands up in SDS certification reviews. For agencies serving Alaska's rural and remote communities, online delivery also solves the practical problem of training staff who may never sit in the same room as a trainer.