OIDAP Documents Released -- What's The Plan?

The Occupational Information Development Advisory Panel (OIDAP), Social Security's effort to develop an alternative to the antiquated Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT), a key element in disability determination, has released some documents from its May 4, 2011 public meeting. 

Many of the speakers the Panel heard were from the Department of Labor, which had prepared the DOT and its successor, the O*NET, and from the Department of the Census, which has its own very limited occupational information system. Maybe these presentations helped the Panel. My possibly jaundiced view is that this was nothing more than window dressing to give an appearance that whatever the Panel produces reflects a scientific consensus.My view may also be influenced by the fact that many of the presentations were in Powerpoint. I agree with those who blame Powerpoint "for everything from corporate [and governmental] stupidification to burying Western civilization in a hailstorm of bullet points."

The more important presentations were from the Panel Chair, Mary Barros-Bailey, and Social Security's Director of Occupational Information System development, Sylvia Karman. What has been posted is not complete enough to give one a clear idea of the plans of Barros-Bailey and Karman but it is clear that Social Security is charging ahead with a major endeavor.

I wish I could get answers to two questions from Barros-Bailey and Karman:

• Let us suppose that you collect data on a job, such as office assistant, and this data shows that it to have been performed at the sedentary level at 20% of employers, at the light level at 70% of employers and at the medium level at 10% of employers. How would this job be categorized in the occupational information system you are developing -- as sedentary, as light or as medium -- or would it be categorized as all three -- or would it would be broken down into three new job titles of Office Assistant I, II and III? A similar question could also be asked about the length of time it takes to learn the job of office assistant or many other criteria.
• When will the decision be made on how to categorize jobs? Before or after the data is collected?

You might think that categorizing a job at all levels at which it is performed would be more accurate, and in a sense it is, but it also produces such muddy results that this approach has always been rejected in the past when occupational information systems were compiled. An occupational information system that does not try to categorize jobs by how they are typically performed could be used to justify denying virtually any disability claim. All you would have to do is to find a few people performing a job at the same limited level as the claimant and you have justification for denial. This is a big country. There are millions of employers. There are many ways that most job can be performed. Employers often regard employees as their friends. Employers make many concessions to the circumstances of individual valued employees, especially those they regard as their friends, concessions that are not available to the general public. Go down this route and vocational information becomes almost irrelevant since you would always be able to find work that a claimant could perform no matter what his or her limitations might be.

I think my concern with OIDAP's work is best summarized with a sports quote whose origins are probably apocryphal : "The problem with referees is that they just don't care which side wins." I would like OIDAP to be that referee who does not care which side wins but I am pretty sure that they do.