By Amy Wallish, NENA Director
Chief Executive Officer, Full Circle Employment Solutions LLC
In case you missed the Social Security email earlier this fall or haven’t been on the choosework.ssa.gov website recently, Social Security has made several enhancements to this section. Hopefully, these enhancements will help users more easily find the information they are searching for. Here is a list of some of the updates.
Find Help Direct Search page: You have expanded filters for searching. You can now search by specific services, disabilities, languages or service delivery mode. You can still search by zip code, state and provider type. You now have the option to pin up to 3 providers to compare. Look for the little pushpin symbol on the left side of each EN name. By each provider name there are added descriptor badges such as benefits counselor and both in-person and virtual.
Service Provider Profile card:
- “Time as an EN” section has been updated so the calculation is done more accurately.
- The Ticket Assignment count is now updated monthly.
- A Benefits Counselor badge has been added.
- The Services/Features section was reformatted for easier reading.
For ENs with multiple office locations:
- If there is no zip code used in the search, the results will show alphabetically.
- If the zip code is used in the search, the result will be the nearest office to the zip code.
- Additional offices can be viewed within the Service Provider Profile card.
Take time now to review these changes. You should also review your profile regularly and especially after Social Security does any updates to make sure your profile is still accurate. There are times when things might have changed due to system updates. I’d suggest you review your profile every 1-2 months.
Did you also know that you can add a marketing statement to your profile highlighting your services? You can use Form 1374: Ticket Program Agreement Change Form and add the marketing statement in Section 5: Additional information. Visit yourtickettowork.ssa.gov for this and other forms, located in the Forms section. This form can be used to request any other changes that you need to make based on reviewing your profile.
On a final note, if you want to pull a list of ENs from the Find Help tool, you can do this by scrolling to the very end of the page where you can select Save/Print. You’ll then select one of the three options and click ok. I prefer to use the third option, save results as a file, which produces an excel spreadsheet that you can then sort. Happy Navigating!
