After one is injured and cannot return to the position held before an accident, how does the vocational rehabilitation specialist know what jobs can still be performed or can be learned through re-training? This process is called transferable skill analysis.

The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and the US Department of Labor classify jobs according to skill levels, unskilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. What most people do not know is that every job has certain academic and aptitude requirements which can also be found in the DOT. Certain jobs, obviously, require more academic preparation than others. Likewise, certain jobs require aptitudes that other jobs do not. One thing is certain; before an accident no one is ever qualified to do all of the jobs that are listed in the DOT.

Surprisingly, however, many vocational rehabilitation experts, when opining about pre-injury earning capacity, take the position that an injured party had such capability. If this were true, truck drivers would have the ability to be neurosurgeons and dishwashers could be electrical engineers!

Considering the specific academic and aptitude requirements of jobs performed before an accident and the skills acquired on these jobs, we can determine what post-injury jobs can be performed using the same or acquired skills. Computer-based applications have been developed to make this job easier, however, they do not give all the answers. It still takes an experienced hand to inject "real world" experience and take an academic exercise and turn it into a viable expert opinion.