About Bob Wilson

Bob Wilson didn’t parachute into workers’ compensation. He came into the industry sideways, through the trenches — from restaurant and hospitality management, where he first learned about workers’ comp the hard way, to human resources and technical recruiting, and eventually to running WorkersCompensation.com, where he spent years interacting with millions of visitors, including the injured workers the system was supposed to serve.

That ground-level experience — hearing directly from the people navigating the system — is what shaped his conviction that the system needs to change. Not revolution. Evolution.

Bob first introduced the concept of “Workers’ Recovery” in 2013 on his blog, From Bob’s Cluttered Desk, which was selected as a top workers’ compensation blog by LexisNexis. Since then, he has promoted the idea in over 200 conference presentations, where it has received consistently strong response from industry professionals who recognize that the system’s focus needs to shift from processing claims to restoring lives.

In 2015, the concept gained a more formal foundation when Robert Aurbach, editor of the IAIABC Journal, invited Bob to write “The Case for Workers’ Recovery” as part of a point-counterpoint debate with Dr. John F. Burton, Jr. — one of the nation’s foremost scholars on workers’ compensation and former chairman of the National Commission on State Workmen’s Compensation Laws. That exercise forced the concept from a loosely defined suggestion into a structured, detailed proposal, and the resulting article series became the foundation for the book now before you.

Bob was designated as one of the “50 Most Influential People in the Workers’ Compensation Industry” by the SEAK Workers’ Compensation and Occupational Medical Conference. He is the founder of WorkCompCollege.com, an educational platform dedicated to improving the knowledge and skills of workers’ compensation professionals.

Bob is also very active with the scholarship organization, Kids’ Chance. He was a founding board member and past-president of Kids’ Chance of Florida, and has served on the national board of directors of Kids’ Chance of America for several years. He is currently the Chair-Elect of that organization.

Known for an extraordinary sense of humor, Bob’s presentations and writing reflect a conviction that the most effective way to drive change in a system that has resisted it for a century is to make people laugh at the absurdity of it — and then show them the path to something better.

He was raised in Durango, Colorado, and is a graduate of Fort Lewis College. He resides with his wife in Sarasota, Florida.