Like many federal bureaucracies, Social Security has developed its own language for describing many of the concepts that underlie a disability evaluation. Since disability considers your capacity to work by looking at both your past work and about other jobs, a description of your past work is an important part of your case evaluation. You should try to become familiar with some of these terms prior to your hearing.
At Social Security hearings, judges often call vocational witnesses to classify your past relevant work. Generally Social Security is concerned with your past relevant work over the past 15 years. Short durations jobs of less than 3 months are usually considered unsuccessful work attempts (UWA) and don’t count as past relevant work.
Vocational witnesses identify both the “exertional level” of your past relevant work as well as the “skill level” of that work. Jobs are classified exertionally as:
- sedentary
- light
- medium
- heavy
- very heavy
More explanation about what these exertional levels mean – page on this blog; post from Colorado disability lawyer Tomasz Stasiuk
Jobs are classified by skill level as:
- unskilled
- semi-skilled
- skilled
Vocational experts use a resource called the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (D.O.T.) to classify the exertional and skill level of every job that (in theory) exists in the national economy of the United States. You can read the D.O.T. online by clicking on the link. Continue reading →