A Worked Transferable Skills Analysis Example

Meet the sample case: what a transferable skills analysis example needs to show

Most CRCs hit the same wall on their first few files: the textbook definition of a transferable skills analysis is straightforward, but the first time you sit down with an actual claimant record — two decades of duty statements, a functional capacity evaluation, and a blank worksheet — the theory doesn't tell you where to start typing. A definition explains what a TSA is. It doesn't show you the mechanics of turning a work history into a defensible occupation shortlist.

This article walks a single hypothetical claimant through that process, step by step, so the mechanics are visible before you apply them to a real file. The claimant, restrictions, and job titles below are fictional and constructed for illustration only — treat every number in this example as a placeholder for the figure you'd pull from the claimant's own record and from current labor market data, not as a fact about any real occupation or wage.

If you haven't yet read the underlying methodology, start with what a transferable skills analysis is and the step-by-step how-to — this piece assumes both and shows them applied. By the end, you'll be able to walk your own case file through the same five checkpoints and know exactly what documentation each one requires.

Step 1 — Documenting the past relevant work

Our sample claimant, "Marcus R.," worked 22 years as a construction site supervisor before a lumbar fusion left him with a permanent restriction: no lifting over 20 pounds, no repetitive bending or stooping, and a sit/stand option. That's the raw material — nothing more, nothing less.

Before any skill can be extracted, the past relevant work has to be documented at the level of formality a fee-schedule payer or a hearing officer expects: job title, employer, dates, hours per week, and — critically — a DOT or O*NET/SOC occupational code assigned to the actual duties performed, not just the job title on a paycheck stub. "Site supervisor" on paper can map to meaningfully different codes depending on whether the person spent their day on blueprints and scheduling or on tools alongside the crew.

For Marcus, the file supports coding him against an occupation with a Specific Vocational Preparation (SVP) level consistent with several years of on-the-job supervisory experience, at a General Educational Development (GED) level consistent with a high school diploma plus trade training, and at a physical demand level of "medium" as historically performed. That physical-demand rating is the number that will matter most three steps from now.

Step 2 — Extracting transferable skills from job duties

With the work history coded, the next step is pulling the actual skills out of the duty statement — not the job title. For Marcus, the duty statement supports skills including: reading and interpreting blueprints and specifications; scheduling subcontractors and sequencing trades; monitoring jobsite safety compliance; tracking material and labor costs against a budget; and maintaining daily production and incident records.

Notice what's absent from that list: nothing about lifting, climbing, or operating equipment. Those were physical demands of the job, not transferable skills — a distinction worth getting right, because it's the skills list, not the demands list, that drives the crosswalk in the next step. A TSA worksheet built around this distinction keeps the two columns separate for exactly this reason: mixing them produces a bloated, unfocused occupation shortlist.

Step 3 — Crosswalking to candidate occupations

This is the step most people picture when they hear "transferable skills analysis": taking the documented skill set and searching for other occupations where the same skills apply, using a DOT-to-ONET/SOC crosswalk. The ONET database — maintained by the National Center for ONET Development under USDOL/ETA — currently covers roughly 900 occupation profiles spanning more than 55,000 jobs, which is the practical scope of candidate occupations any crosswalk search draws from. (Content includes information from ONET, used under CC BY 4.0; O*NET is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.)

For Marcus, a search built around "reads technical specifications," "schedules and coordinates work activities," "monitors compliance with standards," and "tracks costs against budget" surfaces a shortlist of candidate occupations — for illustration, something like construction cost estimator, facilities coordinator, and safety compliance officer. Each of those is a plausible destination for the skill set on paper. Whether any of them survives contact with the claimant's actual physical restrictions is the next question, not this one — a mechanical crosswalk match on skills alone is never the finished analysis. If the mechanics of that crosswalk step are unfamiliar, the DOT-to-O*NET crosswalk explainer covers how the two classification systems actually connect.

Step 4 — Filtering by residual functional capacity and vocational factors

A skills match means nothing if the resulting occupation exceeds the claimant's documented physical capacity, or sits outside their vocational profile on education, age, or SVP. This is the filter step, and it's where a worked example earns its keep, because it's also the step most likely to get challenged in a hearing or contested by a claims examiner.

Marcus's restriction rules out any candidate occupation coded at "medium" physical demand or above as typically performed — which, in this illustration, removes some otherwise skill-matched options and leaves only the "light" and "sedentary" candidates standing. Vocational factors apply next: does the candidate occupation's SVP level fall at or below what Marcus could reasonably acquire given his age, education, and the length of time since he last learned a new skill? Vocational rules differ by the forum applying them — a workers' compensation TSA, an SSA disability determination, and an LTD carrier's own internal standard do not use identical tests for how much vocational adjustment is reasonable to expect of a claimant, so this filter has to be built around whichever forum's standard actually governs the file, not a generic assumption.

Step 5 — Verifying wages and labor market presence

A candidate occupation that survives the skills match and the capacity filter still needs two more checks before it belongs in a final report: it has to pay a wage that's meaningful relative to the claimant's pre-injury earnings, and it has to actually exist in numbers in the claimant's labor market — not just in the classification system.

Wage verification typically draws on BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), which is built from a large, recurring probability sample — semiannual panels of roughly 186,000–189,000 establishments each, for a rolling sample of about 1.1 million establishments nationally. That scale is part of why OEWS is treated as a credible wage source in vocational reports; it is not a convenience-sample estimate. This example does not print specific wage figures for Marcus's candidate occupations, because the correct number is the current OEWS figure for the specific metropolitan or state labor market the claimant lives in — a number that changes by geography and by publication cycle, and belongs in the file as a cited, dated pull, not as a number carried over from a template.

Labor market presence works the same way: a labor market survey step confirms the occupation is actually staffed in the claimant's commuting area, not merely defined in the classification system.

What a transferable skills analysis social security disability case adds

Everything above describes a TSA built for a workers' compensation or LTD file, where the practitioner controls most of the standard being applied. A transferable skills analysis for a Social Security disability claim runs on a different, federally defined framework: SSA's sequential evaluation considers age, education, and past relevant work using its own regulatory definitions of what counts as transferable skill, and it applies age-based rules that become more claimant-favorable as age increases. SSA disability determinations sit against a large and growing beneficiary population — 7,231,147 disabled workers were receiving SSDI benefits as of December 2024, out of 8,614,659 total disability beneficiaries — which is part of why the agency's TSA standard is codified rather than left to case-by-case judgment. The specific regulatory thresholds change over time and are worth confirming directly against current SSA guidance for any active claim; a dedicated look at TSA in the SSA context walks through the sequential evaluation in more depth.

What this worked example does — and doesn't — prove

This walkthrough demonstrates the mechanics of a transferable skills analysis: documented work history, extracted skills, a crosswalk search, a residual-capacity and vocational filter, and a wage/labor-market check, in that order, each one gated on the one before it. It does not demonstrate that Marcus R. — who doesn't exist — would actually be found capable of any of the candidate occupations named above. That conclusion, in a real file, depends on the claimant's actual medical restrictions, actual work history, and the actual vocational standard the forum applies, evaluated by a credentialed practitioner. A worked example teaches the method; it cannot substitute for the record.

If you're ready to run this sequence against a real file, a structured TSA worksheet keeps the five steps separated on paper the way they were separated here, which is most of what keeps a real analysis from collapsing into an unstructured guess. For a starting point built around exactly this five-step sequence, download the TSA Worksheet Pack and adapt it to your caseload.