COOKED
The work — populating boards, crimping and routing harnesses, torquing fasteners, running functional test fixtures, logging results on work orders — is manual rather than text-based, so language AI barely touches it directly. The real pressure is industrial: pick-and-place, automated wire-cutting and crimping cells, AI vision inspection, and offshoring already absorb the high-volume tiers, and BLS has this occupation shrinking for years. What persists is low-volume, high-mix, prototype, and rework assembly where fixturing a robot costs more than a technician's hands, but that tier is smaller than the current headcount and carries no license, no signature, and no client relationship.
Most of this decline happened after 2021 — it is not the pandemic dip.
Median pay $34,810 → $45,850 +5.4% 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
+4.6% 261,400 → 273,300 on the projections basis
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +4.6% 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.
~29,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
MechanicAssemblerConnectorPlug WirerCable WirerWire BenderWire WorkerEncapsulatorHand MounterSkein WinderStem MounterSubassemblerAnode BuilderGrid OperatorPanel BuilderSpeaker WirerElectric WirerLamp AssemblerRelay AdjusterTube RebuilderAssembly WorkerBattery BuilderFinal AssemblerHand Cell Tuber
Holding it up: task resistance . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Populating through-hole boards and dressing a harness by hand still defeats a pick-and-place line at lot sizes of 20, but SMT reflow, automated crimp presses, and AOI already own the volume work you used to do, which puts this at 12 rather than 16 — the manual dexterity holds, the demand for it doesn't.
Some physical or field component You are standing at an ESD bench under a magnifier with hand tools, torque drivers, and test fixtures — physical, but in a climate-controlled, lit, fixtured cell where parts arrive in kitted trays, which is why this sits at 10 and not with the field technician crawling through a machine room at 16.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licence gates this bench; IPC-A-610 or J-STD-001 certification may be required by your employer's customer, but the QA engineer or DER signs the acceptance and the company's AS9100/ISO cert carries the exposure, not your initials on the traveler.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs You work to a build print, a bill of materials, and a written work instruction with rev control, and when a part doesn't fit or a board fails test the call goes to the engineer via a nonconformance tag — the 3 covers the real discretion you do have in solder rework and troubleshooting a bad joint before escalating.
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 (12/20 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 (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (2/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (3/20) 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 6 of this occupation's 28 points (21%).
Embodiment (10/20) 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.
No occupation passed every test: close enough to electrical, electronic, and electromechanical assemblers, except coil winders, tapers, and finishers on skills and subject matter, at least 10 points more resistant, no big jump in training, no new licence, no pay cut, and not shrinking on its own. That happens for 223 of the 654 occupations here that aren't SAFE, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving the section off.
The usual reason is that exposure travels with the skill profile. The jobs most similar to yours tend to be exposed for the same reasons yours is, so the near neighbours don't clear the gap — and the ones that do are a different kind of work, not a transfer of what you already know. Read that as a limit of this method, not a verdict that you're stuck: it only compares whole occupations, and it cannot see specialisation, industry, or anything you'd bring that isn't in a federal skill survey.
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 45/100 — EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift toward low-volume, high-mix, prototype, and field-rework assembly: hand-soldering fine-pitch or through-hole rework on mixed-technology boards, one-off harness building in aerospace/defense NPI shops, and repair of legacy units where no fixture or CAD exists. Fixturing cost per unit keeps these off automated lines regardless of model capability.
Narrow but real: hand-built premium electronics — boutique audio amplifiers, guitar pedals, analog synths, restoration of vintage gear — where point-to-point hand wiring is advertised as the product. This is a few thousand jobs at most and is not a route for the 247k headcount.
Genuine two-tier split: if the high-volume populate-and-test tier is fully absorbed by pick-and-place plus AI optical inspection, the residual job becomes diagnostic rework, first-article build from ambiguous drawings, and debugging why a prototype fails test — work that requires inferring intent from an incomplete BOM. Watch IPC-A-610 Class 3 rework and NPI-only job postings displacing 'assembler I' postings.
Certification-gated build authority: if defense and space primes tighten flowdown so that NASA-STD-8739.4 / J-STD-001ES space-addendum operator certification (and named operator traceability in the build record) becomes a hard contract condition rather than a preference, plus ITAR-driven onshore-only build, a specific certified human's stamp attaches to the joint. Similar route via FAA repair-station certificated personnel for avionics harness work, or IPC-7711/7721 rework certification required by medical-device DHR under FDA QSR.
Escalation authority in an automated line: if the surviving role becomes the human who dispositions vision-system rejects, signs the material review board nonconformance, and decides scrap-versus-rework on a high-value assembly, the call is consequential and traceable to a person. Watch for 'assembler' postings that carry MRB or line-stop authority.
The limit. The binding constraint is industrial automation and offshoring, not model capability, so most levers only protect a tier smaller than current headcount. Certification and MRB routes raise the score of the surviving job without saving the jobs already gone; a higher register score here would describe a much smaller occupation.
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 13,740 | $45,670 +0% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 9,750 | $41,160 -10% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 9,530 | $48,060 +5% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 8,760 | $46,620 +2% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 7,320 | $55,230 +20% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 5,420 | $45,930 +0% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 4,720 | $47,750 +4% |
| San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA | 4,650 | $47,850 +4% |
| Idaho Falls, ID | 170 | $86,330 +88% |
| Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA | 500 | $62,200 +36% |
| Mount Vernon-Anacortes, WA | 40 | $60,130 +31% |
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 28. 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.