EXPOSED
A large share of the day is documentation, diagramming, config generation, IP addressing schemes, and vendor spec comparison — all of which LLMs already produce at usable quality, and network-as-code tooling is compressing the rest. What persists is owning the topology decision when a hospital or bank cannot tolerate downtime, walking a data center or campus to see what the drawings got wrong, and being the person accountable when a segmentation choice becomes a breach. No licensure protects this role; certifications like CCIE/CCDE are market signals, not legal gates.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Subnet plans, VLAN maps, BGP/OSPF config templates, capacity spreadsheets and RFP spec matrices are text artifacts a model drafts in seconds, and Terraform/Ansible/NetBox pipelines already generate device configs from intent — what keeps this at 9 rather than 4 is the multi-year refresh design where you reconcile a 15-year-old wiring closet, an MPLS contract, and a QoS requirement no one wrote down.
Some physical or field component. You are on the raised floor for cutovers, tracing an undocumented fiber run, checking rack power and cooling headroom before signing off on a spine-and-leaf build, and doing campus walk-throughs for wireless heat maps — but that is weeks a year, not daily, and the design work itself happens in Visio and a terminal, which puts it at 7 and not in the field-tech range.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no PE stamp, no state board, and no statute that requires a licensed human to approve a network design; CCIE, CCDE and CISSP get you shortlisted and get your employer partner status, but nothing prevents an unlicensed person — or a vendor's automated design tool — from producing the same topology and having it deployed.
Some relationship component. Enterprise clients and internal stakeholders keep calling the architect who knows why the DMZ was carved up that way in 2019 and who they trust during a 2 a.m. maintenance window, but the deliverable is a design document evaluated on throughput, cost and RTO — you get replaced on the next contract cycle if a competitor's numbers are better, which caps this at 7.
Meaningful discretion. Choosing flat-versus-segmented for a hospital network, deciding whether to accept a single point of failure to hit a budget, and signing off on a firewall policy that will be read in a breach post-mortem are calls with no clean answer and consequences measured in outage minutes and HIPAA/PCI findings — 13 rather than higher because you usually recommend into a change-approval board or CIO who formally owns the acceptance.
Avionics Technicians SAFE
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