ALJ Training report

[Gaidin]

I couldn't this link anywhere else on the site. 

Because I sometimes like to speculate about winning the lottery and other similar day dreams I decide dto see what kind of information there was available about the training process. For those who have completed training I would be curious about your thoughts.


oig.ssa.gov/sites/default/files/audit/full/pdf/A-12-11-11126.pdf

[bartleby]

The four weeks of training is fairly good, but inadequate for those that have no medical or Social Security background. The mentoring is hit or miss, some are great, others are terrible. The one thing you do not want is to have the HOCALJ as your mentor. If you have a problem, you may not want the HOCALJ to know about it. Further, they will usually give you the Agency solution even if that isn't the best one for you. The VOD's are a waste of time for most. A lot of Judges use the VOD time to multi-task and work on otehr things while it runs in the background. The best training is the type where you can ask individual questions and get responses. Try to find someone in training that seems to have it all together and pick their brains. A great mentor is so helpful, but a bad mentor can ruin your day. I have always felt that you can request a different mentor if you don't feel that you are getting what you need out of the one they give you. As usual, JMHO, and I have been tagged as being pessimistic and negative, so beware..

[Deleted]

This report looks to be from 2011, so it is interesting what changes seem to have sprung from it.

When I signed on, the requirement that new ALJ's only schedule X number of cases during their first months was followed uh...hapazardly. At my own request, after one abrevated docket, I said let's move up the process because it's moving too slow for me. At that point they threw me in the deep end with a full docket and I've been there ever since. That would not happen now, I think. They appear to take those requirements much more as gospel and less like guidelines.

I did have a mentor assigned, but like everyone else, he was busy, and I don't recall that we spent much time together. Though, this is not to say that when he was in the office he was not available for questions. Now, they have a much more rigid checklist. The mentor agrees that he/she will spend x- amount of time training, a certain number of hearings viewed, etc. That and they really appear to stress following that checklist and checking off the boxes. All in all, I think a quality improvement.

The four week training is good. Not great, in my opinion. I would have prefered a much more nuts and bolts approach to preforming the functions of the job. More clinic, less theory, I suppose. We did seem to spend a lot of time spinning our wheels. A new ALJ is expected to jump in an master the computer system, the instruction writing system, the remote video equipment,etc. I don't recall that we spent any substantive time learning the actual activites of a daily ALJ, and we concentrated a lot more on law, rules, regs, and policy. A ballance would be better. Just me. I recall a cardiologist coming to speak. I like medicine, but he lost me so quick, and his talk went on for-ever. I don't think I came away from that with any useful information. I would have much prefered "CPMS for ALJ Dummies" and "Microsoft Word and FIT templates for ALJ Dummies".

[trekker]

Sounds just like law school. Learned the law but not the practical aspects. And since there may be no internship or mentor when you start practicing, you learn as you go. So we should be used to that style of learning. I was lucky in my legal career because I got hooked up with a local legal aid program and I was representing clients at hearings at the beginning of my 2L year. And as a legal aid attorney, I was happy to mentor law students and we encouraged them to take on at least one of our federal court appeals so they had experience arguing a case. The medical knowledge needed by an ALJ will come with practice and at least more and more records are electronic so you don't have to interpret the hieroglyphics that doctors used to use. The down side of electronic records -- they begin to read the same and it is hard to find what has changed.

[redryder]

ROBG: You are aware there is a CMPS guide for judges posted on one of the resource pages for SSA, are you not? I agree with your assessment of the training. It would be nice to have had some additional training with CPMS, DGS and the various reporting tools in DART. Some judges never use the DART reports such as K13 that lets you know if new evidence was filed in a scheduled hearing or the new calendar at MY2. Those are real time savers for me.

[sbr]

I was in one of the training classes and had no SSA experience. I thought all three phases of my training were terrific. The first two weeks I went to the hearing office, I observed a lot of hearings before different judges, watched some required VODs (usually while doing something else at the same time), played with the computer to get familiar with CPMS and FIT, and had various meetings with the HOCALJ about office procedures. The most helpful part of those two weeks was watching hearings.

I was also told to give the scheduler my desired hearing days for when I got back to the office and was only scheduled what was in the guidelines. My first week of hearings, I scheduled four hearings an hour apart. In the beginning, it would sometimes take me half a day to a full day to review a single file because I would spend a lot of time looking up listings, learning about drug names and their generic equivalents, and medical procedures. There really is a reason there is a break in period for new ALJs, because they want you to use that time to learn. By the end of my training period, I was up to 6-8 hearings a day, 30-45 minutes apart and could review a case in much less time.

The four week training was long and could have benefitted from some more hands on skills. But having been a trainer (they actually let a NODAR like me with only a couple years of experience be involved in new ALJ training) it is really hard to show someone the ins and outs of the various functionalities of CPMS and DART to a large group and is better shown one on one. Luckily, one of the ALJs in my office was very knowledgeable about all things computers because they were on the eBP training team. I quickly learned to be a fan of the bookmark function, especially to tag diagnostics, like xrays and MRIs. During a hearing, if a rep referred to a certain MRI, I could easily look at my bookmarks to see where that MRI was in the file.

After I got back to the office, I was always asking other ALJs questions. Although I had an official mentor, most ALJs in the office were willing to help, even though they were all busy with their own caseloads. The mentality there was that the faster the “baby” ALJs came up to speed, the easier it would be on the whole office, so the experienced ALJs took the time to help the baby ALJs as much as they could. The most helpful thing for me was sitting down with an ALJ to see how they review a file, and also getting some feedback from the ALJ with my proposed hypothetical VE questions my first few weeks of hearings.

I credit my positive training experience to having been placed in one of the best hearing offices in the country, which included mentors that were in charge of the mentoring program. I know not all new ALJs will have that same experience. Having been in two other offices which weren’t as well run as the first one I was in, it really is important to find someone that is willing to help, so be proactive. If your mentor isn’t working out, don't sit in silence; let your HOCALJ know or contact the mentor coordinator.