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Jasen Walker

Jasen M. Walker (born in Hack’s Point, Maryland on May 6, 1949) is an American educator, vocational expert, and disability management consultant who has more than 30 years of experience working with various issues related to occupational disability, including its prevention. He provides expert testimony in personal injury litigations; conducts seminars for medical, rehabilitation, and legal professionals; and teaches employers how to integrate state-of-the-art disability management programs with their daily operational processes. Walker has developed innovative methods of disability management in the workplace and written numerous articles on vocational rehabilitation and allied constructs. He is the President and Director of Services at Corporate Education and Consultation (CEC) Associates, Incorporated, a multi-service organization with the mission of preventing and managing human risk factors in the workplace. Walker has compiled texts on workplace disability prevention and management as well as disability proneness.



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Disability Management Programs
At the heart of Walker’s work is the development of Disability Management programs in the workplace. Historically, when employees were injured at work, employers hired third party claims and rehabilitation services to outplace the employee by finding him/her employment in another company or by litigating the workers’ compensation claim with the hope of proving the injured employee could work. Often, this resulted in a “cash and carry” type of settlement. For their part, injured workers were either content to remain on workers’ compensation payments for the rest of their lives or rendered helpless by attempting to navigate a lost time system in which they found few positive alternatives to remaining at home. Employers simply wrote off the losses as a means of doing business. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many individual state workers’ compensation systems became overburdened, and with the onset of Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Walker and several other pioneering rehabilitation professionals working in the private sector saw merit in the organizational management (and prevention) of workplace disability.

CEC (and several other companies) were interested in applying “return-to-work” concepts and began to document “best practice” methods and innovate new strategies that urged employers to value their employees and to apply methods that would return injured workers to productivity. The return-to-work movement was based on the premise that by doing so, employers would dramatically reduce their operational costs and retain experienced employees. For a more detailed description of a Disability Management Program and how to implement one, see:


 * Disability Management Program


 * How to Implement a Disability Management Program

Among the methods originated by Walker are:


 * identifying the components of a Disability Management (DM) program


 * creating a comprehensive lexicon (Workipedia) of DM terms


 * developing the methods and material for a Transition-to-Work program


 * applying psychological constructs to organizational DM including: Locus of Control, Attributional Style, Learned Helplessness, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Positive Psychology, Malingering (and co-malingering) and Disability Proneness


 * conducting in-service training for company personnel to implement return-to-work strategies and vocational rehabilitation concepts in their human resources management protocol

Disability Proneness
Following the work of R.C. Behan and A.H. Hirschfeld who, in the 1960s, described the “accident process,” Walker constructed the concept of “disability proneness,” a real and significant phenomenon antecedent to and at times the cause of many cases of chronic vocational disability. Walker was influenced by the writing of M.R. Weinstein, who viewed disability as a social process rather than a discrete medical outcome of disease or trauma. Walker was the first to argue that the workers’ compensation system of lost time often fosters worker learned helplessness and laziness, particularly for those individuals who are disability prone. Disability proneness is the result of complex psychosocial dynamics, including the individual’s explanatory style. In the context of these dynamics, particular individuals become permanently “disabled” by the very compensation system once designed to “make them whole.”

Injured Worker Helplessness
In the late 1980s, Walker constructed the concept of Injured Worker Helplessness and published a series of articles regarding the concept. Walker relied heavily on the work of Martin E.P. Seligman, who formulated the theory of Learned Helplessness and wrote two major books on the issue: Learned Helplessness and Learned Optimism.

Walker found that a protracted stay in the lost time system of Workers’ Compensation (WC), for example, will produce “learned helplessness” in the worker/insurance claimant. Injured workers rather quickly learn that they are not in control of the WC system in which they have fallen. Moreover, they quickly discover that non-contingent reward is part of the quagmire in which they find themselves. Whether injured workers attend physical therapy, whether they even get out of bed, they receive lost-wage benefits, and as a result, in addition to learning “helplessness,” injured workers run the risk of learning “laziness.”

In his work with WC claimants, Walker identified the sources (relationships) leading to claimant’s disinterest in and even resistance to returning to work. The reluctance often derives from dynamics in any one or more of the following relationships:


 * employer ←→ injured worker
 * physician ←→ patient
 * claimant ←→ insurance carrier
 * injured worker ←→ his/her family
 * injured worker ←→ rehabilitation specialist
 * injured worker ←→ attorney

Transition-to-Work
The traditional methods by which employers dealt with employees who had been injured was either to ignore them, attempt to “vocationally rehabilitate” them to alternative employment outside the organization (usually through a private sector rehabilitation provider), or bring them back to the workplace with what was called a “Light Duty” approach. Under this method, employees were given less exertional “make work” assignments that occupied them until they were well enough to return to their jobs or until the benefits could be permanently modified.

Transition-to-Work (TTW) is a process that involves the injured worker in a real work assignment but managed in incremental steps of duration and strength requirements. The steps are designed to increase over time with specific targets and achievement goals. Another important aspect of TTW is that the transition is planned and documented by a team of staff members responsible for the design and the implementation of the plan. Vocational assessment and rehabilitation become an integral part of the employer’s assistance to the injured worker.

Walker developed the methods and materials for TTW and has made them available to industry professionals.

Publications (a sampling)
Walker, JM. (2009). Assessing Occupational Disability Following Trauma and Impairment. In Assessment of Impairment: From Theory to Practice(pp. 143-154). New York, NY: Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN: 978-0-387-87541-5.

Walker, JM. (2009). Application of the FCE (Functional Capacity Evaluation) by Vocational Experts. In Guide to the Evaluation of Functional Ability: How to Request, Interpret, and Apply Functional Capacity Evaluations(pp. 357-365). Chicago, IL: AMA Press. ISBN: 978-1-60359-001-3.

Walker, JM. (2009). Explaining Acquired Occupational Disability. The Rehabilitation Professional, 17(2), 51-62.

Walker, JM. (2008, September & November). Disability Management Parallels Positive Psychology in Work Organizations. Pennsylvania Self-Insurers' Assoication Newsletter.

Walker, JM. (2007). SHRM White Paper: Human Resource Management of Disability Proneness. Society for Human Resource Managementas a white paper.

Walker, JM. (2006). Disability, Dysfunction or Deception: Explaining Acquired Occupational Disability. The Forensic Examiner, 15(1), 12-23.

Walker, JM. (2006). Pennsylvania Employer Return-to-Work Programs. In Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Guide, 2007/2008 Ed.(pp.261-266). Harrisburg, PA: Pennsylvania Chamber of Business & Industry. ISBN: 1-929744-21-8.

Walker, JM. (2005, May). Vocational/Disability Assessment as an Adjunct to Psychotherapy of Individuals with Acquired Disabilities. The Pennsylvania Psychologist, 15-16.

Walker, JM. (2003). Disabler: A Game Occupational Health Nurses Cannot Afford To Play. AAOHN Journal, 51(10), 421-424.

Walker, JM. (1998, November). Understanding Disability: A Lexicon. Risk Management, 14-22.

Walker, JM. (1997, June 4). Double Jeopardy: Workers’ Comp Act 57 and ADA. The Legal Intelligencer.

Walker, JM. (1996, Winter). Disability Management: Fixing The Broken Paradigm. Case Review.

Walker, JM. (1995, December). Well-Managed Companies and Their Support of Disability Management Programs. In The Mainstream.

Walker, JM. (1995, June). 10 Tips for Disability Management Programs. Risk Management, 57-61.

Walker, JM. (1993). The Difference Between Disability and Impairment: A Distinction Worth Making. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 3(3), 167-172.

Walker, JM. (1992). Injured Worker Helplessness: Critical Relationships and Systems Level Approaches for Intervention. Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, 2(4), 201-209.

Professional Accreditations
Licensed Professional Counselor for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, State Board of Social Workers, Marriage and Family Therapists and Professional Counselors, #PC000378, 2002.

Licensed Rehabilitation Counselor for the State of New Jersey, #RC01568, 1999.

Diplomate – The American Board of Vocational Experts, 1986 to present.

Diplomate – The American College of Forensic Examiners, 1996 to present.

Senior Disability Analyst and Diplomate – American Board of Disability Analysts, 1996 to present.

Certified Rehabilitation Counselor (CRC), I.D. #12868, 1978 to present.

Certified Case Manager (CCM), I.D. #05783, 1993 to present.

Vocational Expert for Social Security Administration, Bureau of Hearings and Appeals, 1979 to present.

Vocational Expert – United States Railroad Retirement Board, Bureau of Hearings and Appeals, June 1986 to present.

Teaching Associate – Assigned to the College of Education, Temple University, 1976 to 1978.

Instructor – Temple University, Department of Psychoeducational Processes, 1978 to 1982.

Instructor – Villanova University; Graduate School, College of Education and Human Services – Rehabilitation Courses, 1992 to 1995.

Related Topics
Disability Management Program

How to Implement a Disability Management Program

Positive Psychology