You must complete a doctor's or master's degree in marriage, family and child counseling, clinical psychology or a related area. The degree must be from a Board-approved or an accredited school and must include a minimum of 60 semester units in specified areas of instruction, including a minimum 225 hours of face-to-face counseling. Following registration for your internship, you must complete additional courses in subjects that include child abuse assessment and reporting, human sexuality, alcohol and chemical dependency and spousal abuse.
Submit an application form, an official school transcript, a program certification and the receipt from your Live Scan fingerprinting to the Board of Behavioral Sciences to register as an MFT Intern.
During your internship, you must complete 104 weeks of supervision and 3,000 hours of supervised work. Because your required time commitment is significant, verify that the person providing your supervision has a valid license before you start.
You earn a week of supervision by participating in either 1 hour of individual supervision or 2 hours of group supervision in a week. At least 52 of these weeks must be earned through individual supervision. The 3,000 hours of supervised work requires specific numbers of hours of direct counseling experience, counseling-related administrative tasks and noncounseling work. You must be participating in supervision to get credit for hours of experience. You can earn up to 1,300 of your supervised hours while you are still in school, but the ratio of supervision to work hours is higher during that time. All of your hours of supervision and work experience must be carefully documented using forms provided by the Board.
When you have completed your internship, submit an MFT Examination Eligibility Application. This application is used to verify that your work experience was earned within the 6 years preceding the date of your examination. The only exception to this "6-year rule" is that up to a maximum of 500 hours of work experience earned while you were in school will be accepted, even if it occurred more than 6 years prior to the testing.
You must pass two tests to meet California MFT qualifications, the MFT Standard Written Examination and the MFT Written Clinical Vignette Examination. The first contains at least 175 multiple choice items covering clinical evaluation, crisis management, treatment planning, treatment, ethics and law. The MFT Written Clinical Vignette Examination is made up of five to seven examples of clinical situations with four to seven multiple-choice questions about each one. These questions cover the same subject areas as the first test, but apply them to practical situations.