The Social Security Administration (SSA) has announced that they're developing a new Occupational Information System (OIS) to replace the information currently obtained from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), including the Selected Characteristics of Occupations (SCO) and Revised Handbook for Analyzing Jobs (RHAJ).
There's widespread agreement among the legal community and the SSA that the Dictionary of Occupational Titles is outdated, with inaccurate job descriptions, obsolete jobs, as well as missing jobs.
But what to do?
The U.S. Dept. of Labor, the original author of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, created the O*NET, to meet its needs. But the O*NET has not proved useful for SSA's needs.
The SSA has created an Occupational Information Development Advisory Panel (OIDAP) under the Federal Advisory Committee Act to advise the agency with research and development issues related to the development of occupational information designed to meet SSA's needs.
Mary Barros-Bailey, Ph.D., serves as the OIDAP's interm chair. Dr. Barros-Bailey has reached out to the legal community and others to obtain feedback on the development of the OIS. She and the panel members of OIDAP are wrestling with a number of issues, including:
- Should job descriptions include the mental and cognitive demands of work?
- Are there better ways to measure mental and cognitive limitations of claimants?
- Does unskilled work exist?
- Can transferable skills analysis be better performed by software?
- How can collecting and presenting data about individual claimants (their limitations, duties of past employment, etc.) be improved?
- Should a new occupational information system take job accommodations into account?
- How can we know that a particular job exists in a significant numbers in the national economy?
- What Daubert considerations are pertinent to a new occupational information system?
We encourage everyone to participate in the open forum that the OIDAP has created for the development of the OIS.
To read Dr. Barros-Bailey's memo and accompanying documents, click here.