What is the Role of the Vocational Evaluator?

A vocation is not just work: It is the special way in which an individual spends his or her life before and after post-acute rehabilitation at NeuLife. Here’s how a vocational evaluator helps.

One of the definitions of “vocation” is the special function of an individual or group[1].

Most individuals who come to NeuLife have had a vocation, perhaps even several, before the traumatic injury or diagnosis that brings them to us. What the individual and his or her family and friends must realize is that many, if not all of those skills still exist. Each client has made it through huge physical or neurological traumas — largely intact. Now, he or she just has to get back on track through NeuLife’s innovative post-acute rehabilitation. The track may be different from the one that he or she was on, but there will be a track.

The trauma that led to becoming a NeuLife client may have been a stroke or some other kind of traumatic brain injury, a work-related injury, a spinal cord injury, a limb amputation or some other kind of catastrophic injury. That is in the past. Now that the individual is at NeuLife, the premier location in Florida for post-acute rehabilitation and life re-building from catastrophic injuries, a new “track” is developed in the form of a customized Client Goal Plan.

It is understandable that a client may feel a little “down.” He or she was good at a vocation and it might now feel that it has been taken away. Perhaps the precise activity was, but all possible vocations related to it have not. This raises the concept of “transferrable skills.” The Code of Federal Regulations, which furnishes guidance for the implementation of Federal statutory law, defines the term, in part, as:

Skills that can be used in other jobs, when the skilled or semiskilled work activities that the person has done in the past can be used to meet the requirements of skilled or semi-skilled work activities of other kinds of jobs or work.. This depends largely on the similarity of occupational significant work activities among different jobs.

            The transferability of a person’s skills is most probably and meaningful among jobs in which:

            The same or a lesser degree of skills is required (Specific Vocational Preparation), and

            The same or similar tools or machines are used (work fields), and the same or similar raw materials, products, processes or services are involves (Materials, Products, Subject Matter, and Services)[2].

Here is where the vocational evaluator comes in. The function that he or she performs is a type of independent functional evaluation, but it is sometimes confused with a vocational assessment. While vocational assessment takes what might be said to be a global view of the individual’s work and training background, general functional capabilities, medical, psychological and other factors, vocational evaluation is a more specific examination. It looks at factors such as the individual’s work-related characteristics important for education and re-training to get and keep new employment.

The vocational evaluator examines work characteristics like areas of interest, skills, level of ambition, general intelligence, temperaments, physical capacities, strength, range of motion and other work-related functions and aptitudes. Other factors are, and must be considered, including medical and cognitive ones[3]. Some of the tools that are used by the vocational evaluators at NeuLife include:

• Standardized testing and paper-pencil testing. Areas in which this is used include evaluation of specific vocational areas including cognitive (IQ, neuropsychological functions), achievement, aptitude, interest, personality, work values, career beliefs, career decision-making process, career development and career maturity;
• Work samples are often used to evaluate individuals whom through their catastrophic injuries, have severe physical or cognitive injury;
• Situational assessment and process, which is similar to work samples. It involves places an individual with a disability in a simulated work condition and environment that resembles the actual job that the individual will be placed; and
• The transferrable skills analysis is usually used in situations in which the worker has skills that can be transferred to another position that result in a faster job placement and the return to independence for the individual.

The comprehensive evaluation of each client at NeuLife results in the development of an individualized Client Goal Plan. Because we recognize that among the long-term needs of each client is the achievement of independence, and that bringing true meaning to the individual’s life through a sense of productivity is vital to it, vocational evaluation is integral to that which we provide.

[1] Mirriam-Webster Dictionary, www.m-w.com

[2] CFR 20-404.1568

[3] Lee GK. 2010. Vocational Rehabilitation for People with Disabilities. In: JH Stone, M Blouin, editors. International Encyclopedia of Rehabilitation. Available online: http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/encyclopedia/en/article/128/