COOKED
The core work — winding wire onto forms, taping and insulating coils, dipping and lacing leads, checking turns counts and continuity — is repetitive bench work already handled by CNC winding machines and automated taping lines in high-volume plants. What keeps the remaining 12,840 jobs alive is low-volume, large, or odd-geometry work (traction motors, custom transformers, motor rewind shops) where fixturing an automated line isn't worth it, plus hand finishing and machine tending. That's a shrinking niche, and the pressure comes from mechanical automation and offshoring rather than language AI.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $36,520 → $48,220 +5.6% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
-6.3% 12,200 → 11,500 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -6.3% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,200 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
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Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier A 10 reflects the split: programmable winding machines already handle turns counting, wire tensioning, and layer indexing on standard bobbins, but hand-taping a 4,000 lb traction motor stator, lacing leads in a rewind shop, and stripping and re-forming burnt field coils still need a person at the bench, which is why this sits mid-band rather than down at 4.
Some physical or field component An 11 is right because the work is physical — feeding wire, dipping coils in varnish, working around hot ovens and solvent fumes, lifting stator frames — but it happens at a fixed bench or machine station inside a plant with jigs and fixtures, not out in an uncontrolled field environment like a lineworker or millwright.
No licence, no signature requirement A 1 is accurate: nothing you do requires a state licence or certification card, the coil ships under the manufacturer's UL or IEEE insulation-class listing, and if a winding fails hipot or shorts in service it's the plant's QC and engineering signatures that answer for it, not yours.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs A 4 acknowledges the real calls you make — spotting a nicked enamel before it becomes a turn-to-turn short, deciding a varnish dip needs a second pass, judging tension on fine wire — but these are read against a winding sheet, print, and spec sheet that already fix turns, wire gauge, and insulation class, with a supervisor or engineer owning any deviation.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (10/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (2/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (4/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 7 of this occupation's 28 points (25%).
Embodiment (11/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Sheet Metal Workers SAFE
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 39/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift within the surviving niche: as CNC winders swallow all repeatable geometries, what remains is diagnostic rewind work — stripping a burned 4160V traction or mill motor, reverse-engineering a coil with no surviving drawing from the damaged original, deciding slot fill, insulation class and connection scheme, and forming odd-geometry coils by hand. EASA-member rewind shops already describe this as the bulk of their work. This raises task_resistance without any new law, but on a shrinking base of jobs.
Consolidation of the winder role with the repair-decision role in small rewind shops: the same person judges whether a core is salvageable, whether to rewind or scrap a $200k traction motor, and signs the surge/hipot results. Where headcount shrinks to a handful, that call stops being escalated. Watch for job postings merging 'coil winder' with 'motor repair technician / test technician'.
Field/on-site rewind and taping work in situ — large generator stator rewinds, wind turbine nacelle and hydro generator coil replacement done at height or inside the machine rather than on a bench. If growth in wind O&M and grid transformer repair shifts more coil work to unfixturable field settings (already a stated service line at shops serving utilities), the physical unpredictability rises.
Insulation-system and repair conformance certification attaching to a named person: EASA/ANSI AR100 rewind conformance, IEEE 1068 motor repair standard, or IEC/UL insulation-system qualification being required by utility and OEM purchase specs with a signed test-and-repair record. Also IEEE 43/95 winding test reports signed for warranty. This shields the shop and the certified test technician, not the bench winder, so the ceiling here is low.
The limit. No realistic route to a trust premium: buyers of coils and rewinds specify performance and test results, never a human maker, and there is no consumer-facing artisanal market. The binding constraint is not AI at all — it is mechanical automation of high-volume winding plus offshoring of transformer and motor manufacture, so even the best case here is a smaller, more skilled occupation rather than a safer one. Total realistic headroom is roughly 10-12 points, landing mid-40s at best.
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 760 | $47,460 -2% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 440 | $44,060 -9% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 300 | $45,330 -6% |
| Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY | 280 | $61,990 +29% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 270 | $45,810 -5% |
| Memphis, TN-MS-AR | 240 | $42,050 -13% |
| Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia, NC-SC | 230 | $60,380 +25% |
| Cleveland, OH | 230 | $47,770 -1% |
| Appleton, WI | 40 | $66,630 +38% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 220 | $63,230 +31% |
| Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY | 280 | $61,990 +29% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 28. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.