{
  "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register",
  "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/career-technical-education-teachers-postsecondary/",
  "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology",
  "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.",
  "scored_at": "2026-08-11",
  "model": "claude-opus-5",
  "occupation": {
    "title": "Career/Technical Education Teachers, Postsecondary",
    "soc_code": "25-1194",
    "category": "Education",
    "us_employment": 114110,
    "median_annual_wage": 63820
  },
  "verdict": "EXPOSED",
  "risk_resistance": 64,
  "contested": false,
  "near_boundary": false,
  "dimensions": {
    "task_resistance": 14,
    "embodiment": 16,
    "liability_shield": 7,
    "trust_premium": 15,
    "judgment_accountability": 12
  },
  "reasoning": {
    "task_resistance": "Watching a student lay a fillet weld and calling out travel speed and arc length before the puddle goes cold, or catching a phlebotomy student's bevel angle mid-stick, is the graded event itself — AI can write the rubric but cannot stand at the booth, which is why this sits at 14 rather than mid-band, held below 17 only because the lecture, syllabus, quiz-bank, and OSHA/theory modules that front-load most CTE courses are already being delivered by LMS content and generated slide decks.",
    "embodiment": "You are on a shop floor with live 480V panels, refrigerant, deep fryers, chop saws, and cadaver-free but blood-borne-pathogen-exposed clinical labs, doing tool maintenance and shop safety walkthroughs alongside 18 students who have never held the equipment — 16 not 20 because the environment is a controlled institutional lab with lockouts and posted procedures, not a customer's crawlspace or a live jobsite.",
    "liability_shield": "At 7 the credential is real but points outward: your welding CWI, ASE master tech, RN, or state cosmetology instructor licence is the hiring gate and in nursing-assistant and cosmetology programs the state board actually names an approved instructor of record, yet in most trade areas an employer accepts industry experience plus program approval, and negligence in the lab lands on the college's insurer rather than your personal licence.",
    "trust_premium": "Students enroll because a working tradesperson vouches for them to the employers who hire out of your program — the internship placement, the apprenticeship referral, the phone call to the shop foreman you worked with for twelve years — and that reputational pipeline is not transferable, sitting at 15 rather than 18 because completion certificates and third-party credentials (NCCER, ASE, ServSafe) carry weight independent of who taught you.",
    "judgment_accountability": "You decide whether a student is safe to operate the equipment unsupervised and whether to sign off competency on a clinical or shop skill that goes into a state licensure file — real consequence — but 12 rather than 15 because those calls run against written competency checklists, accreditation-mandated hour counts, and program standards someone else wrote, so the ambiguity is in the marginal student rather than in the standard."
  },
  "rationale": "The modal CTE instructor teaches welding, automotive, HVAC, culinary, nursing-assistant, or cosmetology programs at a community or technical college, and most of the job is standing in a shop or lab watching students' hands and correcting technique in real time — that does not digitize. What AI eats is the paperwork layer: syllabi, lecture slides, quiz banks, competency checklists, accreditation and program-review documentation, and grading of written work. Licensure protects the trades being taught more than the teacher; industry credentials and state program approval matter, but a signed stamp is rarely required to instruct.",
  "outlook": "Enrollment in hands-on trade programs is holding or growing while the lecture-and-paperwork half of the job compresses, so expect fewer classroom hours, more lab hours, and instructors judged on placement rates and pass rates.",
  "what_would_raise_it": {
    "levers": [
      {
        "dimension": "liability_shield",
        "change": "Accrediting and licensing bodies that require a named, credentialed human instructor-of-record to attest to each student's hands-on competency before a state credential is issued — e.g. state nurse aide (CNA) training rules under 42 CFR 483.152 requiring a qualified instructor to sign off skills checkoffs, AWS Certified Welding Instructor sign-off on performance qualification tests, state cosmetology boards' clock-hour attestation, and FAA Part 147 airframe/powerplant instructor certification. Extension of the same signature-and-liability model to HVAC (EPA 608 proctoring), automotive (ASE Education Foundation program accreditation), and CDL third-party skills examiners would deepen it; so would a board rule making the signing instructor personally liable for falsified hours or unverified competency.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 5
      },
      {
        "dimension": "judgment_accountability",
        "change": "Formal gatekeeping duties written into program rules: the instructor deciding to remove a student from a live shop for unsafe conduct, deciding a student is not competent to sit a licensure exam, or being the designated third-party CDL/EPA/AWS examiner whose pass-fail call is auditable and revocable. OSHA-driven lab safety supervision responsibility and state audits of clock-hour records push the same way.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 4
      },
      {
        "dimension": "task_resistance",
        "change": "Task-mix shift: this job genuinely has two tiers. If slide decks, quiz banks, syllabi, accreditation self-studies and program-review narratives are absorbed by institutional AI tooling, what remains is live hands-on coaching, shop safety supervision, equipment maintenance, and employer/apprenticeship liaison — the tier no current system does.",
        "plausibility": "already happening",
        "would_add": 3
      },
      {
        "dimension": "trust_premium",
        "change": "Employer-sponsored and union apprenticeship models where the sponsor (e.g. a registered apprenticeship under 29 CFR 29, IBEW/NECA JATCs, manufacturer academies like Toyota T-TEN or Caterpillar ThinkBIG) contracts specifically for a journey-level human instructor with documented field years. Growth in employer-paid upskilling contracts that name instructor credentials would raise this.",
        "plausibility": "plausible",
        "would_add": 2
      }
    ],
    "ceiling_note": "Embodiment is already near ceiling and cannot rise meaningfully. The main downside risk is not AI but enrollment and state funding: adjunctification and section consolidation cut headcount regardless of how these dimensions score."
  },
  "adjudication": null,
  "employment_history": {
    "points": [
      {
        "y": 2019,
        "emp": 112210,
        "wage": 54620
      },
      {
        "y": 2020,
        "emp": 105830,
        "wage": 55620
      },
      {
        "y": 2021,
        "emp": 105440,
        "wage": 59840
      },
      {
        "y": 2022,
        "emp": 103100,
        "wage": 59840
      },
      {
        "y": 2023,
        "emp": 111180,
        "wage": 62060
      },
      {
        "y": 2024,
        "emp": 111150,
        "wage": 61490
      },
      {
        "y": 2025,
        "emp": 114110,
        "wage": 63820
      }
    ],
    "from": 2019,
    "to": 2025,
    "change_pct": 1.7,
    "comparable_from": 2019,
    "spans_soc_revision": false
  },
  "pivots": [
    {
      "slug": "first-line-supervisors-of-firefighting-and-prevention-workers",
      "title": "First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers",
      "verdict": "SAFE",
      "risk_resistance": 80,
      "median_wage": 93530,
      "overlap": 60,
      "skills_to_close": [
        "Management of Personnel Resources",
        "Operations Monitoring",
        "Service Orientation",
        "Coordination"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms"
}