How to Perform a Transferable Skills Analysis, Step by Step

The report that fell apart on cross-examination

A vocational expert takes the stand with a transferable skills analysis that concludes the claimant can perform three sedentary occupations. Opposing counsel asks a simple question: which specific skill from the claimant's fifteen years as a machine operator transfers to occupation number two, and at what SVP level was that skill originally performed? The expert pauses. The worksheet behind the conclusion skipped a step — it went from job title straight to occupation match, with no documented skill-extraction or exertion-level filter in between. The conclusion may still be right, but the rationale isn't on paper, and that gap is what gets exploited. This is the failure mode a disciplined, step-by-step transferable skills analysis is built to prevent. By the end of this piece you'll have a repeatable sequence — from raw work history to a documented, defensible occupation shortlist — that holds up when someone asks "how did you get there?"

What a transferable skills analysis actually requires before you start

A transferable skills analysis (TSA) is the structured process of taking a person's documented work history, extracting the skills embedded in it, and matching those skills against other occupations the person could reasonably perform given their physical, educational, and vocational profile. If you need the foundational definition and when a TSA is required, that groundwork is covered separately — see what a transferable skills analysis is for the full picture. Here, the focus is narrower: the mechanical steps of doing one.

Before touching a worksheet, three inputs need to be in hand: a complete work history (job titles, dates, duties, and how each job was actually performed — not just the job description), current functional/medical restrictions from the treating or evaluating physician, and the referral context (workers' compensation, Social Security disability, long-term disability, or litigation), because the context shapes which occupations are relevant and how the final report will be used. Skipping this framing step is the single most common reason a TSA has to be redone.

Step 1: capture a complete, verifiable work history

Start with every job the individual held in the relevant look-back period the referral source specifies — this window is set by the referring carrier, attorney, or agency and varies by program and jurisdiction, so confirm it rather than assume a standard number of years. For each job, document:

• Job title and employer, with dates of employment
• A duty-by-duty description in the worker's own words, not the employer's job posting
• The physical demand level actually performed (not what a job description says, but what the worker did — lifting, carrying, standing, sitting, reaching)
• Tools, equipment, and technology used
• Supervisory or decision-making responsibility
• How the skills were acquired (formal training, on-the-job, apprenticeship)

The gap between "job description" and "actual duties performed" is where most TSA errors originate. A worker classified as a general "administrative assistant" might have spent 80% of their time doing skilled bookkeeping — a materially different skill set than filing and scheduling. Get this wrong at intake and every downstream match inherits the error.

Step 2: extract and rate skills, not job titles

Once the work history is documented, the next step is pulling out the discrete, transferable skills — not the job titles. This is the step most often shortcut, and it's the one a structured transferable skills analysis worksheet is designed to force, because it makes you write the skill down as its own line item rather than let it stay implicit in a job title.

For each prior job, list the skills separately: what was measured, monitored, or inspected; what was operated, driven, or repaired; what was calculated, recorded, or reported; what was coordinated, supervised, or negotiated. A skill like "reading blueprints to set machine tolerances" is transferable in a way that "machine operator" as a title is not — the title tells you almost nothing on its own; the skill is what crosswalks.

Rate each skill by how it was acquired (specific vocational preparation) and how central it was to the job (core duty vs. occasional task). Skills performed daily over years carry more transfer weight than skills used occasionally. This rating is qualitative judgment applied consistently — write down the reasoning, because a reviewer (or a cross-examining attorney) will want to know why one skill was weighted more heavily than another.

Step 3: crosswalk to DOT and O*NET/SOC occupations

With a documented skill list in hand, the next step is matching those skills against the universe of occupations. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) remains the reference point for exertion level and SVP (Specific Vocational Preparation) coding in most workers' compensation and disability contexts, even though it is no longer actively updated by the Department of Labor. The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is the living, maintained replacement, built around the SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) taxonomy and covering roughly 900 occupation profiles spanning more than 55,000 individual jobs. Both are public-domain government data sets, not proprietary content — the analysis you build sits on top of them, it doesn't reinterpret them.

Crosswalking means taking the skill list from Step 2 and asking: which DOT and ONET/SOC occupations require this same skill set, at a comparable skill level? This is mechanically the most detail-dense step in the whole process, and it's easy to get inconsistent results doing it by hand across dozens of candidate occupations. The full mechanics of moving between DOT codes and ONET/SOC codes — including where the two systems diverge — are covered in the O*NET/DOT crosswalk explainer. At minimum, document which source code you used for each match and why, so the rationale is traceable later.

(ONET content used under CC BY 4.0; ONET is a trademark of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration.)

Step 4: filter by exertion level, SVP, and skill level

A skill match is necessary but not sufficient. The candidate occupation also has to be one the individual can physically and vocationally perform given their current restrictions. This is where exertion level, SVP, and skill level filtering does its work, and it's the step that most directly separates a defensible TSA from a list of loosely related job titles.

• Exertion level (sedentary, light, medium, heavy, very heavy) must be at or below the worker's documented physical capacity from the medical restrictions.
• SVP (the time typically required to learn the job, from short demonstration up to over 10 years) should be at or below what the worker's actual training and experience support — you generally cannot transfer skills up into an occupation that requires substantially more preparation than the worker has.
• Skill level (unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled) works alongside SVP to confirm the occupation isn't a mismatch in complexity, not just in physical demand.

Every occupation that survives this filter should have a documented reason it passed — the exertion level compared against the restriction, the SVP compared against the worker's actual preparation, and the skill match from Step 2 that justified including it in the first place.

The detailed logic of applying these three filters together — including common edge cases like a worker whose restrictions changed mid-analysis — is worked through in the exertion, SVP, and skill-level filtering guide. Treat this as the step you cannot compress: a shortlist that skips explicit filtering is a shortlist that cannot explain itself.

Step 5: layer in wage and labor market data

An occupation that survives the skill and physical filters still needs a wage-earning-capacity check and, in most referral contexts, some evidence the occupation exists in the relevant labor market. Wage data for this comparison typically comes from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program, which builds its estimates from a semiannual survey drawing on a probability sample of roughly 1.1 million establishments nationally. That scale is part of why OEWS wage bands are treated as a credible reference point rather than an anecdotal guess — but it also means the estimates are averages across a wide sample, not a guarantee of what any single local employer pays.

At this stage, compute a rough pre-injury versus post-injury wage-earning-capacity comparison as a worked example: if the worker's pre-injury wage was $28/hour and the surviving occupation shortlist clusters around a median wage band of, say, $19–22/hour in the relevant OEWS wage data for that SOC code, that spread is the wage-loss figure a rehabilitation counselor's report will need to explain — not paper over. This is illustrative math to show the method; the actual wage figures always come from the current OEWS release for the relevant geography, never from memory or a prior year's report.

If the labor market survey step is new territory, note that confirming an occupation is not just theoretically transferable but actually available in the worker's commuting area is its own distinct exercise, generally conducted after the TSA shortlist is set, not before.

Step 6: document the analysis so it holds up

Every step above produces a paper trail, and that paper trail is the actual deliverable — not just the final list of occupations. A defensible TSA file includes the work history as documented, the skill list with acquisition and centrality ratings, the crosswalk source and code for each candidate occupation, the exertion/SVP/skill-level filter results with pass/fail reasoning, and the wage data pulled with its source and date. If an occupation was considered and rejected, note why — anyone reviewing the file needs to see the full candidate pool, not just the survivors.

This documentation matters differently depending on referral context, and that context is always jurisdiction-specific. A TSA feeding a California workers' compensation Supplemental Job Displacement Benefit determination, for example, sits inside a $6,000 voucher program that is specific to California and should never be assumed to apply, or to translate directly, to any other state's workers' compensation system. The same discipline applies across every jurisdiction: confirm current deadlines, evidentiary standards, and required forms with the relevant workers' comp board, the Social Security Administration, or the carrier before finalizing a report — never generalize one state's or program's rules to another.

None of this documentation substitutes for the credentialed evaluator's judgment. A TSA worksheet, however well organized, is an estimating and organizing aid built from the practitioner's own inputs. It is the counselor's or CRC's signature, training, and defensible reasoning — not the worksheet — that turns an organized shortlist into a professional opinion.

Where a worksheet — and software — earn their keep

Doing all six steps by hand, on paper or in a general spreadsheet, is possible but slow, and the slowness is exactly where errors creep in: a skill gets missed, a wage figure goes stale, an exertion filter gets applied inconsistently across two similar cases. A structured worksheet forces the sequence — work history, then skills, then crosswalk, then filter, then wage, then documentation — so nothing gets skipped under deadline pressure. To see the full method applied to an actual case file end to end, the worked transferable skills analysis example walks through one referral start to finish, and the TSA resource hub collects the related how-to pieces in one place.

If you're ready to put this sequence into practice on your next referral, the TSA Worksheet Pack lays out all six steps as a fillable template — work history capture, skill extraction and rating, crosswalk documentation, exertion/SVP/skill-level filter log, and a wage-comparison worksheet — so the paper trail builds itself as you work the case. Download the TSA Worksheet Pack and run your next analysis against a structure built to survive the question "how did you get there?"