By Tamar Asedo Sherman
When we are injured or impaired, we tend to be so focused on what we can no longer do that we lose sight of what we still can do. We forget all about the skills, talents, and abilities we developed over the years that remain and which could be used in other jobs or occupations. Those are called transferable skills and we all have them.
Take Julio, for instance, a carpenter who came in to my office for a career assessment after falling off a deck he was building. He knew he couldn’t return to the work he loved, but he wanted to work at something to feel productive and earn money beyond his minimal workers compensation check.
As a rehabilitation counselor, my job was to determine what else he could do by finding out what skills he developed over 17 years in construction, and where else he could use them. After talking with him and learning his interests, I looked up “carpenter” at www.online.onetcenter.org . It lists tasks, tools and technology, knowledge, skills, abilities, work activities, work context, and more.
Under skills, it says:
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• Mathematics – Using mathematics to solve problems.
• Judgment and Decision Making – Considering the relative costs and benefits of potential actions to choose the most appropriate one.
• Active Learning – Understanding the implications of new information for both current and future problem-solving and decision-making.
• Management of Material Resources – Obtaining and seeing to the appropriate use of equipment, facilities, and materials needed to do certain work.
• Quality Control Analysis – Conducting tests and inspections of products, services, or processes to evaluate quality or performance.
• Installation – Installing equipment, machines, wiring, or programs to meet specifications.
• Management of Financial Resources – Determining how money will be spent to get the work done, and accounting for these expenditures. Julio could still do all of them, except the actual installation part. He expressed interest in being a home or building inspector or a cost estimator for home remodeling or insurance purposes. Based on academic testing, which I administered, and my recommendation that both seemed to be realistic goals for him, his state vocational rehabilitation counselor decided to send him for short-term vocational training to pursue a new career.
A similar situation existed for Marianne, a registered nurse who stopped working after 20 years due to visual disturbances resulting from multiple sclerosis (MS). She was demoralized, hanging her head to show that she felt she was useless. Yet, despite her inability to perform some tasks, she still retained many skills. And she sat taller in her chair and held her head up higher with each one that I enumerated:
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• Social Perceptiveness – Being aware of others’ reactions and understanding why they react as they do.
• Critical Thinking – Using logic and reasoning to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems.
• Service Orientation – Actively looking for ways to help people.
• Active Listening – Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
• Speaking – Talking to others to convey information effectively.
• Instructing – Teaching others how to do something.
These are all skills she did not lose with her vision. She could use them to work with health insurance companies or consult with parents of pediatric patients or people taking medications for MS over the phone.
You can do your own research at www.online.onetcenter.org to see what skills you might have that you forgot about. Then you can use the Skills Search function to identify occupations you could explore. You can create a customized skill list by selecting skills from six broad groups: Basic Skills, Complex Problem Solving Skills, Resource Management Skills, Social Skills, Systems Skills, and Technical Skills.
You can search to find occupations that match your skills list or search job families for groups of occupations based upon work performed, skills, education, training, and credentials. There are job families such as “healthcare practitioners and technical,” “education, training and library,” “installation, maintenance and repair,” “construction and extraction,” “transportation and material moving,” and more.
You might well discover that you can do more than you thought. And if you think you need an accommodation to perform the essential tasks, there is a link to the Job Accommodation Network at www.jan.wvu.edu.
The next step is to contact your state’s vocational rehabilitation department to explore the possibility of returning to work. Tell the counselor if there is a program you want, where it is and when it starts. Most likely, the state will pay for it, or part of it, to get you back to work.
Tamar Asedo Sherman works as an employment specialist at UCP-Suffolk in Hauppauge, NY. She can be reached at action@unitedspinal.org
