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.
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.
Some relationship component. 6 sits at the floor of relationship-bearing work: the design engineers who keep requesting you by name because you know which supplier's connectors fail and where the last three revisions bit them is real value, but the deliverable is a test report, a build, and a red-lined schematic that another competent technician could have produced, and the customer of record rarely knows your name.
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.
Avionics Technicians SAFE
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