SAFE
The core of this job is putting hands and meters on motor controls, PLCs, drives, switchgear, and industrial electronics in live plants — tracing intermittent faults, pulling boards, reterminating, and calibrating in dirty, energized, non-standardized environments that robotics cannot enter. AI absorbs the paperwork layer: interpreting schematics, suggesting fault trees, drafting service reports, and predicting failures from sensor data, which raises the diagnostic floor but does not replace the technician. The soft spot is licensure — most states require no specific license for equipment repair, so the moat is skill and physical access rather than a legal signature.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $59,300 → $74,090 -0.0% 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
-0.8% 61,100 → 60,700 on the projections basis
Hard to automate, but shrinking anyway
The work resists current AI, yet the BLS projects -0.8% by 2034. Whatever is shrinking this occupation, the evidence does not point to automation — demand, demographics, offshoring and industry decline all shrink jobs that no machine could do.
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.
~4,700 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
WiremanAerial ErectorRadar MechanicRadar RepairerGear TechnicianAerial InstallerRadar TechnicianScale TechnicianRepair SpecialistRepair TechnicianAmplifier MechanicControl TechnicianAutomation MechanicElectronic MechanicMetrology TechnicianMicrowave TechnicianMissile Pad MechanicAutomation TechnicianElectrical TechnicianElectronic TechnicianElectrician TechnicianAccess Control InstallerRadio Interference ExpertControl Systems Technician
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Tasks largely resist digitisation Chasing an intermittent fault on a 20-year-old VFD or a legacy Allen-Bradley PLC5 means physically wiggling terminations, scoping waveforms at the drive output, and swapping suspect boards to isolate — the diagnosis lives in what your hands and meter find on undocumented, retrofitted equipment, which is why this sits at 16 rather than the 10-12 of technicians whose gear self-reports faults over a standard bus.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments You are inside energized cabinets, on lifts at conveyor level, behind machine guards in hot and dusty plants, doing LOTO on gear that was never installed to drawing — 19 not 20 only because bench repair of pulled boards and cards is a real slice of the work and does happen in a controlled shop.
Certification preferred, not legally required No state requires a license to troubleshoot a servo drive or replace a controller card; what you carry is NFPA 70E arc-flash qualification, employer-issued qualified-person status, and manufacturer certifications on specific drive and PLC families — that keeps you above the uncertified 0-4 band but nowhere near an electrical contractor's or PE's personal signature.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls Calling whether a warm switchgear section can run until the scheduled outage or must be dropped now, and deciding to re-energize after a repair, are your calls with an arc-flash and a six-figure downtime bill on either side of them — 14 rather than 17 because a plant engineer or the OEM signs off on major replacements and the scope of the ambiguity is one machine, not a whole facility.
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 (16/20 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 (7/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (11/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) 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 32 of this occupation's 67 points (48%).
Embodiment (19/20) 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.
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 86/100, still SAFE.
Energized-work permits under NFPA 70E / OSHA 1910.333 becoming an insurer-audited artifact: property carriers (FM Global, Zurich) conditioning arc-flash and equipment-damage coverage on a named 'qualified person' signing the permit, the incident-energy analysis, and post-repair verification. This is already how some large plants operate contractually; generalizing it makes the named human legally exposed rather than merely competent.
OEM-authorized-service structures tightening: manufacturers (Rockwell, Siemens, ABB) voiding warranty or blocking firmware/licence keys unless repair is performed by a factory-certified individual technician. Buyers then pay specifically for the credentialed person, not the cheapest hands. Already partly in force on drives and safety PLCs.
Task-mix shift as AI absorbs the schematic-reading, fault-tree, and report tier: the residual day becomes intermittent-fault chasing, undocumented legacy retrofits, and calls where sensor data and the AI's prediction are wrong. Genuine two-tier occupation, but headroom is small because the score is already 16 and the physical tier was never the automatable part.
State electrical licensing boards closing the 'maintenance/repair exemption' that currently lets industrial equipment repairers work energized gear without a journeyman or maintenance-electrician license — several states (e.g. Ohio, Texas, Washington) periodically revisit this exemption in board rulemaking. If repair of switchgear and motor control centers above a voltage threshold requires a licensed individual, the signature moat appears where there is none.
IEC 62443 / NERC CIP-style OT cybersecurity regimes extending to plant floors, requiring a named, credentialed technician to attest to firmware and PLC logic changes made on-site — because an AI-suggested drive parameter or ladder-logic edit becomes an auditable configuration change requiring human attestation.
Formal lockout/tagout and return-to-service authority being vested in the individual technician by union or site contract — the person who energizes owns the call, including overriding an AI 'safe to restart' recommendation. Visible in some IBEW and USW maintenance agreements and in pharma/food GMP requalification sign-offs.
The limit. Capability dimensions are near saturation; realistic upside is 8-12 points and lives almost entirely in liability_shield, which is the one dimension a state board or an insurer can change by writing a rule. Trust premium is capped because the buyer is a plant maintenance manager buying uptime, not a consumer buying humanness.
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 4,690 | $77,880 +5% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 2,910 | $73,530 -1% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 1,300 | $76,190 +3% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 1,230 | $79,930 +8% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 1,060 | $80,440 +9% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 1,050 | $67,370 -9% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 980 | $76,320 +3% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 960 | $61,430 -17% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 600 | $122,860 +66% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 910 | $109,570 +48% |
| Beaumont-Port Arthur, TX | 400 | $105,520 +42% |
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 67. 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.