EXPOSED
The modal technician splits time between screen work — drafting schematics and PCB layouts in CAD, writing test scripts, logging and charting instrument data, producing test reports — and bench work: building prototypes, soldering rework, wiring test fixtures, running oscilloscopes and spectrum analyzers, calibrating equipment, and troubleshooting boards that fail for reasons no datasheet predicted. AI is already eating the documentation, data-reduction, and routine layout-checking half, but nobody has a robot that can probe a misbehaving board, spot a cold joint, or improvise a test rig. There is no license requirement here; the PE stamp belongs to the engineer, which removes the regulatory shield that protects licensed trades.
This fall is concentrated in 2020 and has not recovered since.
Median pay $65,260 → $78,190 -4.1% 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
+0.6% 93,700 → 94,300 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +0.6% 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.
~8,400 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 An 11 reflects that roughly half the week — DRC-clean layout passes, netlist checks, LabVIEW/Python test-script scaffolding, and turning captured waveform CSVs into report figures — is already automatable or nearly so, while the other half (bringing up a board that won't boot, chasing intermittent EMI, jigging a fixture for a part that has no eval board) still needs a person at the bench, which keeps it out of the 0-6 band but well short of resistant.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 14 lands just into hands-on because the work is physical in ways a screen can't cover — hot-air rework on 0402s and BGAs, hand-probing live boards, terminating harnesses, running loopback and continuity checks in test cells, hauling a scope to a plant floor or antenna range for field measurements — but it's mostly a bench or lab you control, not a utility pole in weather, which is what separates it from an 18.
No licence, no signature requirement 4 because nothing about this job requires a state license: the PE seal on the drawing set and the sign-off on the safety-critical design belong to the engineer, and while an ETA/ISCET cert or IPC-A-610/J-STD-001 solder qualification may be asked for on the resume or by a customer contract, no statute makes you personally answerable for a failed board.
Meaningful discretion 10 is discretion inside a bounded frame — you decide the probe points, whether a marginal reading is instrument noise or a real fault, whether to pass or reject a unit against spec, and what to escalate — but the acceptance criteria, tolerance limits, and test plan come down from engineering, and the call to ship or redesign is not yours.
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 (11/20 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 (4/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (6/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (10/20) 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 20 of this occupation's 45 points (44%).
Embodiment (14/20) 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.
Avionics Technicians 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 61/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift: the CAD-checking, test-report writing, and data-reduction tier is genuinely automatable, and when it goes the residual job is hardware bring-up debug — probing intermittent faults, EMI/signal-integrity chasing, improvising fixtures. This is a real two-tier occupation, and the surviving tier is the one no toolchain touches.
Shift of employment toward field/depot work rather than lab bench: aerospace and defense sustainment, utility substation relay testing, semiconductor fab tool support, where the environment is uncontrolled and the board is inside a machine that cannot be moved. Already visible as US fab and defense buildout (CHIPS-funded sites, submarine industrial base) pulls technicians into on-site roles.
Not a PE route, but certification-based signing authority: NETA/InterNational Electrical Testing Association ANSI/NETA ATS acceptance-testing requires certified technicians to sign test reports, and NFPA 70B (now a standard, 2023) plus NFPA 70E arc-flash studies push owners and insurers to demand a named certified technician's signature on electrical test and calibration records. If insurers or state electrical codes make NETA/NICET certification mandatory for acceptance and maintenance test sign-off, personal accountability attaches where none exists now. Similarly ISO 17025 calibration records require a named authorized signatory.
Ownership of test-evidence integrity under DO-160/DO-254, IEC 61508 SIL verification, or FDA design-verification protocols, where the technician who executed the test attests that the article and setup matched the protocol and is the named witness in an audit. Growth of functional-safety and cybersecurity-certification regimes (EU Cyber Resilience Act, UL 2900) expands the number of consequential attestation calls a technician personally owns.
The limit. There is no realistic trust_premium route: buyers are firms procuring verified hardware, not consumers choosing a human, and nobody pays extra for a human-soldered prototype. The strongest levers here are certification-based sign-off and physical field work, not license capture — an unlicensed occupation adjacent to a licensed one (PE) rarely acquires its own stamp.
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 3,290 | $78,190 +0% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 3,230 | $81,940 +5% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 2,960 | $82,000 +5% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2,880 | $95,280 +22% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 2,720 | $75,580 -3% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 2,590 | $84,090 +8% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 2,200 | $69,410 -11% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 1,980 | $91,620 +17% |
| Bremerton-Silverdale-Port Orchard, WA | 250 | $106,250 +36% |
| Atlantic City-Hammonton, NJ | 50 | $103,480 +32% |
| Bakersfield-Delano, CA | 540 | $103,170 +32% |
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 45. 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.