Worker’s compensation offers a range of benefits, but you may only focus on the monetary and medical ones. The other benefits can be just as helpful in making it easier for you to work again, especially after an injury that requires a lengthy recovery time.
Retraining benefits can allow you to improve your skills or knowledge to find a better job or enter a new field. This is handy if your injury makes it impossible to return to your old job but does not prevent you from working at all because usually, you would not be eligible for long-term workers’ compensation payments if you can return to work in some capacity.
Supplemental Job Displacement Benefit
According to the State of California Department of Industrial Relations, the Supplemental Job Displacement Benefit is the part of workers’ compensation that provides you with specific money to use for training and education. You get an SJDB voucher acceptable by state-approved schools. You can use the voucher to enroll in programs that allow you to gain skills to reenter the workforce.
Eligibility
Eligibility for the SJDB requires that you have a lasting disability from the on-the-job injury that makes it so you cannot return to your former job and your employer did not provide you with a different job to which to return, so you have to look for a different one. You have a need to gain new skills or knowledge so that you can get back to work on a new career path in which your permanent disability will not prevent you from working.
