EXPOSED
Log analysis, alert triage, ticket documentation, config generation, and first-line 'why is the VPN down' diagnosis are exactly what AIOps platforms and LLMs now do at usable quality, and much of the monitoring layer was already scripted before AI arrived. What holds is the physical half: pulling and certifying cable, swapping failed switches and optics, racking gear in closets and MDFs, and standing in front of a flapping link at 2am when the dashboard says everything is green. The modal worker here is a mid-level enterprise or MSP network tech, not a CCIE architect — the architecture tier survives better than the tier scored here.
Most of this decline happened after 2021 — it is not the pandemic dip.
Median pay $63,460 → $76,220 -3.9% 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
+1.8% 152,700 → 155,500 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +1.8% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
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.
~9,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Cloud EngineerNetwork AnalystSupport EngineerCustomer EngineerTechnical AnalystComputer NetworkerNetwork ConsultantNetwork SpecialistNetwork TechnicianSupport TechnicianSystems SpecialistControls ProgrammerInternet SpecialistNetworking SpecialistInstallation TechnicianNetwork Control AnalystNetwork Data SpecialistSurveillance TechnicianCloud Support SpecialistComputer Network AnalystConfiguration TechnicianField Systems TechnicianNetwork Field TechnicianNetwork Support Engineer
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Ping sweeps, SNMP threshold alerts, ACL and VLAN config generation, and closing Tier-1 tickets on 'can't reach the file share' are already handled by AIOps correlation and scripted runbooks, which is why this sits at 9 rather than 14 — but packet captures on an intermittent duplex mismatch, or tracing a rogue DHCP server through a building nobody documented, still require a person to iterate against physical reality.
Some physical or field component A 10 reflects a job split roughly down the middle: half the shift is a laptop against a jump host, half is terminating Cat6A, seating SFP+ optics, testing fiber with an OTDR, and hauling a spare 48-port switch into a hot IDF closet — real hands-on work, but in wiring rooms and datacenters rather than the uncontrolled rooftops and trenches that earn 15+.
No licence, no signature requirement CCNA, Network+, or JNCIA are hiring filters that an employer can waive for anyone with five years of production experience; when a misapplied spanning-tree change loops a hospital network, the exposure lands on the organization and its E&O insurer, not on your certificate, and no state board can pull your credential.
Meaningful discretion You decide whether to fail over the WAN circuit mid-business-day, whether the flapping port is a bad optic or a failing line card, and when to escalate versus keep troubleshooting — genuine calls made without a script — but change windows, approval workflows, and vendor TAC escalation paths mean you rarely own the final ambiguous decision alone, which caps this at 9.
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 (9/20 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 (2/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (7/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (9/20) 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 18 of this occupation's 37 points (49%).
Embodiment (10/20) 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.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to computer network support specialists on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
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 49/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift is genuinely available here: if AIOps absorbs alert triage, ticket writing and first-line VPN/DNS diagnosis, what remains is the residual tier — undocumented brownfield networks, vendor-bug isolation, packet captures on intermittent physical-layer faults, and cutover planning where the AI's config output has to be reconciled against reality. Watchable marker: MSP job postings for 'network support' shifting required skills from ticket volume to wireless survey, SD-WAN migration and root-cause on escalated P1s.
Growth in the physically-anchored share of the role: PoE camera and access-control networks, 802.11ax/6E site surveys requiring on-site spectrum measurement, industrial/OT Ethernet in plants where remote access is prohibited by segmentation policy, and fiber splicing/certification (Fluke test reports) that a customer or building code requires signed by a person on site. If OT segmentation standards like IEC 62443 zone rules keep spreading into manufacturing, more diagnosis must happen inside the fence line.
Contractual and insurance-driven rather than licensing: cyber-insurance carriers increasingly requiring a named individual to attest to network segmentation, MFA and patch state at renewal, and CMMC Level 2 assessments for defense-contractor networks requiring identified personnel responsible for control implementation. Low-voltage/electrical licensing in states that regulate structured cabling installation (e.g. limited-energy licenses) also puts a named licensee on the cable side. This raises the floor but does not create a professional liability regime comparable to PE or CPA.
If the role formally owns change-approval and emergency-rollback authority — the person who decides whether to fail over, isolate a segment during a suspected ransomware event, or block an AI-proposed config from touching production — accountability concentrates. Watchable marker: ITIL change-advisory or on-call runbooks that name network support as the required human approver for automated remediation, a pattern appearing in AIOps deployments that keep 'human-in-the-loop' gates on write actions.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route: buyers of network support purchase uptime, not human contact, and the trend is toward fewer named techs per client under MSP contracts. Liability is capped by the absence of any licensing board for network operations — attestation and insurance riders are weaker shields than statutory signature requirements, so this occupation is unlikely to exceed the mid-50s overall.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 6,330 | $86,930 +14% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 5,390 | $57,220 -25% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 5,100 | $92,400 +21% |
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 4,910 | $102,980 +35% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 4,740 | $73,340 -4% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 3,580 | $82,750 +9% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 3,340 | $75,930 +0% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 3,110 | $81,720 +7% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 1,080 | $124,130 +63% |
| Bridgeport-Stamford-Danbury, CT | 130 | $104,690 +37% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 2,320 | $104,610 +37% |
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 37. 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.