The Transferable Skills Analysis Worksheet: What Belongs on It

When a Blank Cell Becomes the Cross-Examination Question

A carrier's attorney doesn't ask you to defend your conclusion. She asks you to defend the row that led to it. "You listed this claimant's job as 'general laborer.' Where's the DOT code? Where's the SVP level? Show me the skill statement that got you from that job title to the three occupations you're recommending." If the answer lives in your memory instead of on the page, the report — and the fee tied to it — is in trouble.

This is the quiet failure mode of transferable skills analysis work: not the methodology, which most CRCs know cold, but the worksheet that's supposed to carry the methodology's evidence. A worksheet that's really just a job-title list with a wage column bolted on doesn't hold up, because it skips the steps that make a transferable skills analysis worksheet defensible — the graded skill statements, the weighted ratings, the explicit overlap test. By the end of this piece you'll know exactly what belongs in each zone of that worksheet and why leaving one out is what gets a TSA opinion picked apart.

The Work-History Ledger: The Foundation Row

Every transferable skills analysis worksheet starts with a ledger of the claimant's relevant past work — not a resume summary, but a structured record built job by job. For each position, the row needs:

• Job title as performed and job title as generally performed (these diverge more often than practitioners expect — a claimant's "supervisor" title may not match the supervisory duties a DOT/O*NET classification requires).
• Dates and duration, tied to the durational threshold your governing framework applies for "relevant" work history.
• DOT code or O*NET-SOC code, selected deliberately rather than defaulted to the closest-sounding title.
• SVP (Specific Vocational Preparation) level, strength category, and the worker-trait ratings (GED reasoning/math/language, aptitudes, work fields, MPSMS) that the coding system attaches to that occupation.
• Source narrative — where the job description came from: claimant interview, employer job description, a prior vocational report, or the practitioner's own crosswalk judgment. Note the source in the cell itself; a reviewer six months from now shouldn't have to guess.

This ledger is the foundation because everything downstream — skill statements, ratings, the overlap gate — is only as good as the job coding underneath it. A worksheet that skips straight to "skills identified" without documenting how each past job was coded is asking a reader to trust a step they can't see.

Skill Statements: Turning Duties Into Transferable Units

The middle zone of the worksheet converts each coded job into discrete, transferable skill statements — the unit of analysis a transferable skills analysis actually operates on. A skill statement is not a duty restated ("operated a forklift"); it's the underlying capacity abstracted to a level that can be tested against other occupations ("operates powered material-handling equipment to specified tolerances; reads work orders; performs pre-shift equipment checks").

Each skill statement row should carry:

• The originating job (linked back to the work-history ledger row).
• The skill statement itself, written at a consistent level of abstraction across the whole worksheet — too specific and nothing transfers; too generic and everything appears to transfer, which is its own credibility problem.
• The worker trait or aptitude it draws from, so a reviewer can see the skill statement isn't invented but derived from the coding system's own trait language.

This is the section most worksheets shortchange, because it's the slowest to do by hand — each job might yield four to eight skill statements, and a claimant with a twenty-year work history can generate a long list before any occupational matching even starts. It's also the section a reader will scrutinize hardest, because skill statements are where practitioner judgment first enters the record. Vague or duplicated statements here are the most common reason a worksheet reads as thin under review.

SVP and Weighted Ratings: Scoring What Actually Transfers

Not every skill statement carries equal weight, and a worksheet that treats them as interchangeable produces a flat, unconvincing match list. This is where SVP (Specific Vocational Preparation) levels earn their place on the sheet: SVP measures how long it typically takes a worker to learn a given occupation to the point of average performance, and it's the anchor most practitioners use to judge whether a skill genuinely transfers or merely resembles another job on the surface.

The weighted-ratings section should score each skill statement against candidate occupations on at least:

• SVP compatibility — can the claimant reach competency in the target occupation within a comparable preparation window, or does the target require substantially more specific vocational preparation than the source job provided?
• Strength/exertional level — sedentary through very heavy, checked against any medical restrictions on file.
• Worker-trait proximity — how closely the target occupation's GED, aptitude, and work-field profile matches the profile already established in the work-history ledger.
• A numeric or ordinal weight (even a simple high/medium/low scale) that lets a reader see, at a glance, why one candidate occupation outranked another.

The point of weighting isn't to produce a false precision — it's to make the ranking legible. A worksheet that lists five candidate occupations with no visible reason one comes before another invites the question "why this order?" A weighted-ratings column answers it before it's asked.

The Overlap Gate: Where Most Worksheets Fail

The overlap gate is the single most consequential — and most frequently skipped — zone on a transferable skills analysis worksheet. This is the explicit checkpoint where a skill statement is tested against a candidate occupation's requirements and either passes or doesn't, with the reasoning shown.

A working overlap gate documents, for each candidate occupation:

• Which specific skill statements support the match, cited by row number back to the skill-statement zone — not a general "skills are transferable" assertion.
• Which worker traits or SVP thresholds the candidate occupation requires that the claimant's profile does or doesn't meet.
• The gate decision — pass, fail, or conditional (e.g., "passes with reasonable accommodation" or "passes pending confirmation of current labor market presence").
• A note on labor market currency — an occupation can pass every skill and trait test and still fail the gate if it no longer has a meaningful presence in the relevant labor market, which is a separate check from skill transfer itself.

Skipping the overlap gate is what turns a defensible TSA into a list of jobs that merely sound plausible next to the claimant's resume. It's also the section opposing counsel will target first, because "show me the gate" is a much sharper cross-examination question than "show me your conclusion."

Documentation Trail: Making the Worksheet Defensible

The last zone isn't analytical — it's procedural, and it's what separates a worksheet built for a file from a worksheet built for a hearing. It should record:

• Coding source and version — which classification system and edition informed the DOT/O*NET-SOC codes used, since occupational classification systems are periodically updated and a stale crosswalk is a fair target for challenge.
• Date of analysis and date of any revision, with prior versions retained rather than overwritten — a worksheet that's been silently edited after a deadline is a worse problem than one with an acknowledged, dated revision.
• Preparer initials or signature line, because the worksheet supports the credentialed practitioner's opinion — it doesn't substitute for it.
• A note on jurisdiction, if the analysis feeds a report bound by a specific state or provincial framework, since reporting formats and acceptable methodologies for a transferable skills analysis are jurisdiction-specific and shouldn't be assumed to carry over from one state or province to another.

None of this documentation zone requires new judgment. It requires discipline — the same discipline that turns a spreadsheet into work product a carrier, a TPA, or a court will actually rely on.

Building the Worksheet vs. Buying It

You can build all five zones in a spreadsheet, and many practices do for years before the manual version starts costing them time on every single case. The tradeoff is consistency: a hand-built worksheet drifts case to case, counselor to counselor, unless someone actively maintains the template. A structured transferable skills analysis worksheet — with the work-history ledger, skill-statement bank, weighted-rating logic, and overlap gate built as a repeatable structure rather than reinvented per file — keeps that consistency without extra effort per case.

If you want the structure without building it from scratch, the TSA Worksheet Pack lays out all five zones as a ready-to-use template. For the surrounding methodology, see what a transferable skills analysis actually is, a step-by-step walkthrough of how to perform one, a worked transferable skills analysis example, and a closer look at how SVP levels work. For the full set of related guides, the transferable skills analysis resource hub is the index worth bookmarking.