EXPOSED
This is a residual bucket — career counselors in niche settings, financial-wellness counselors, genetic-support and grief counselors, credit and housing counselors — so score the modal worker: someone who runs one-on-one sessions, assesses a client's situation, and connects them to programs or plans. The session itself, where a person discloses something hard and needs to be heard by a human who will follow up, is the product and does not automate. What does automate is the paperwork spine: intake forms, progress notes, eligibility screening, resource lookups, referral letters, and the standard-plan drafting that consumes much of the week, plus the low-acuity informational conversations chatbots now handle acceptably.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 13 the session work holds — a client disclosing a foreclosure notice or a bad genetic result needs a person across the table who will call them back — but roughly the other half of the week is HUD-mandated intake and budget worksheets, benefits eligibility screening, resource-directory lookups, referral letters and template action plans, all of which draft themselves now, which keeps this out of the 14+ band.
Some physical or field component. A 9 rather than a 3 reflects that this bucket works out of community agencies, hospitals, prisons, schools and clients' living rooms — home visits for housing counseling, bedside grief support, worksite financial-wellness sessions — but no one is lifting, driving a route, or operating equipment, so the physical demand is presence-in-place rather than hands-on work.
Certification preferred, not legally required. An 8 is the honest middle: many in this bucket hold real credentials — HUD certification for housing counselors, NFCC/AFCPE for credit and financial counselors, GCC or NBCC-adjacent letters for genetic and career work — but these are agency-level or voluntary certifications, not a state licence with a board that can strip your right to practice, and the agency, lender, or supervising clinician carries the exposure when advice goes wrong.
The human relationship is the product. 17 is warranted because the client came back for you specifically — the person who knows they hid the second credit card, who sat with them the week their child died, who remembers which employer rejected them last month — and a referral to a program lands only if the client believes the counselor is on their side; the reason it isn't 19 is that some of this work is single-encounter, agency-assigned, and closes when the file closes.
Meaningful discretion. 13 covers real discretion inside guardrails: deciding whether a client is stable enough for a repayment plan versus bankruptcy referral, whether grief has crossed into something needing clinical handoff, whether to flag suspected abuse — consequential calls, but made against agency protocol, funder rules and escalation paths rather than as the final unreviewable decision-maker.
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