Labor Market Access Analysis

The impact of an injury or incident on an individual’s labor market access, and thus his or her employment potential, is often a key question that requires vocational expertise to assess.  When labor market access is a central issue in a case, after the gathering of relevant information through various evaluation procedures (e.g. records review; structured interview; occupational analysis; vocational and psychometric testing; transferable skills analysis), an analysis of how certain permanent activity guides (in the form of functional limitations and restrictions) can be performed to determine the approximate percentage loss of access, if any, that an individual has sustained attributable to a specific injury or incident.  In such cases, the degree of lost labor market access is often used as a measure of the degree of permanent vocational disability sustained by the plaintiff (e.g. an injured worker in a workers’ compensation case).