…. Continuing with our series on books that you should have in your library as an SSA vocational expert is the Handbook for Analyzing Jobs. Direct out of the introduction for the Handbook it says that it “contains the methodology and benchmarks used by the cooperative federal state occupational analysis program in gathering and recording information about jobs.”  This includes all of the definitions of over 13,000 occupations and even goes so far as to associate them with the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) that we recently covered. That level of association means that this Handbook provides you a in depth resource and method to pair with the DOT to really understand the nature of job information. 

The HALJ also defines the approach used to gather occupational data.  Understanding this data along with the HALJ format presentation really aids in job analysis – this presentation directly lines up the area that the SSA vocational expert excels in…that of understanding data, people, and things and how the worker has a relationship with those specific items to come up with the overall attributes that ultimately contribute to successful job performance. While you can access snippets of this in digital format at SkillTRAN’s website, having a hard copy in your library or on your desk will provide that invaluable resource that you can turn to at anytime.  Check it out on Amazon here.