EXPOSED
This catch-all bucket holds instructional support staff, learning-center and tutoring coordinators, curriculum and media assistants, and program aides; the modal worker splits time between screen work (building lesson materials, cataloging resources, scheduling, tracking student progress, answering reference and referral questions) and in-person contact with students on a campus or in a library. The screen half is exactly what generative AI does cheaply — worksheet generation, reading-level adaptation, resource summaries, routine research help. The in-person half — sitting with a struggling student, running a study skills group, keeping a program physically operating — holds, but it carries no license and no signature requirement, so the only real moat is presence and relationship.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. Roughly half the workday — drafting worksheets, adapting texts to reading level, writing resource guides, pulling citations for a student's paper, logging attendance and progress notes — is text-in/text-out work a model does in seconds, while the other half (sitting beside a student who won't start their essay, running a small-group study skills session, setting up a maker space or testing room) doesn't compress, which is why this lands at 9 rather than in the resistant teens.
Some physical or field component. You are on a campus or in a library building: shelving and processing materials, moving AV carts and laptops, staffing a tutoring desk, proctoring a testing room, supervising a group during an after-school block — physical but in controlled, climate-conditioned, predictable spaces, which puts it at 10 rather than the 15+ of a field technician or trades instructor.
No licence, no signature requirement. Most of these positions require a bachelor's or less with no state credential, no teaching license, and no professional certification a state board could pull — the certified teacher of record or the head librarian signs off on grades, IEP paperwork, and collection decisions, so the 3 reflects a real absence of statutory gatekeeping, not merely weak protection.
Some relationship component. An 11 recognises that the student who keeps coming back to your table, or the teacher who routes their toughest reader to you, is choosing you specifically — but the assignment is often term-length, students rotate, and the district can post the role and fill it without the returning cohort collapsing, so the relationship supports the work without being the deliverable.
Meaningful discretion. You decide which intervention a struggling reader gets next, when to escalate a behaviour or welfare concern, and how to reallocate a session when three students show up needing different things — real discretion inside a curriculum, a district handbook and a mandated-reporting chain that specifies the escalation, which is why it sits at 8 and not in the mid-teens where the final call is yours to own.
Has AI actually changed your work?