EXPOSED
The paperwork half of this job — work-order routing, shift scheduling, parts requisitions, warranty claims, PM compliance logs, productivity reports — is exactly what scheduling software plus LLMs now handle, and fleet/maintenance platforms are already absorbing it. The half that holds is standing in the bay or on the site: verifying a tech's diagnosis on a stubborn intermittent fault, deciding whether a unit is safe to release, handling a customer escalation, and being the name on the OSHA and comeback investigations. Modal worker here is a shop or field-service foreman who came up as a technician; the credential is experience, not a license, which limits the shield.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $67,460 → $79,860 -5.3% 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
+3.1% 617,500 → 636,500 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +3.1% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 62/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
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.
~52,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Grip BossWire ChiefRig ManagerShop ForemanShop ManagerGarage ManagerRepeater ChiefLine SupervisorService ManagerShop SupervisorCable SupervisorMeter SupervisorPlant Wire ChiefGarage SupervisorGround Crew ChiefRepair SupervisorRigger SupervisorSignal SupervisorElectrical ForemanRetread SupervisorSalvage SupervisorService SupervisorMaintenance ForemanMaintenance Manager
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 13 the split is roughly even: dispatch boards, PM interval tracking, warranty submission, tech productivity scorecards and parts reorder points are already running themselves inside CMMS and dealer DMS platforms, but nobody has automated walking out to a bay to confirm a tech misread a live-data freeze frame, road-testing a repair before it goes back to a customer, or deciding which of four jobs the one guy who can weld aluminum takes first — that's why it isn't 8, and the volume of screen work is why it isn't 17.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 15 reflects that the supervisor's day is spent in the shop or on the customer's roof, lift bay, boiler room or job site — lockout/tagout verification, torque and leak checks, confined-space and fall-protection sign-offs, riding out with a tech on a comeback — in environments with jacked-up vehicles, live refrigerant and energized panels rather than a controlled test cell, though the desk hours for scheduling and payroll keep it out of the high teens.
Certification preferred, not legally required 7 rather than 3 because many of these supervisors hold real tickets — EPA 608, ASE Master or L1, state HVAC/electrical journeyman or contractor licenses, DOT brake and annual-inspection certification — and in some jurisdictions the shop's inspection or contractor license runs through a named individual; it isn't 14 because the majority path to foreman is seniority and diagnostic skill, and when a repair fails the claim generally lands on the employer's garagekeeper's coverage, not on the supervisor personally.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls 16 is earned by the release decision: signing off that a brake job, gas furnace, crane or aerial lift is safe to return to service, deciding whether an intermittent fault warrants tearing down further or sending it out, judging when a technician is unqualified or impaired for a task, and being the person interviewed when OSHA arrives after an injury or when a released unit fails in service — high-stakes calls made on incomplete diagnostic evidence, with procedures that guide but do not decide.
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 (13/20 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 (16/20) 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 34 of this occupation's 62 points (55%).
Embodiment (15/20) 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 first-line supervisors of mechanics, installers, and repairers 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.
Here is that claim on your own job rather than in the abstract. These are the three occupations closest to this one by skill and subject matter — the places the work would most naturally transfer — with what the register scores them:
That is the whole problem in three lines. The nearest work is not meaningfully safer, so there is no move here that trades a similar skill set for a better verdict. This is not us running out of ideas — it is what the neighbourhood looks like.
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 77/100 — SAFE.
OSHA 'competent person' and lockout/tagout designations becoming a documented, individually-named role in insurer-required safety programs, with workers' comp carriers and general liability underwriters conditioning premiums on a named human supervisor sign-off for confined space, energized work, and lift/crane operations — already appearing in construction OCIP requirements.
As diagnostic AI and telematics take over routing and fault-code triage, the residual decision — release-to-service on an ambiguous intermittent fault, or pulling a unit from a revenue run — concentrates on the supervisor, and post-incident NTSB/OSHA/plaintiff discovery names that person. Task-mix shift, no new law needed.
Expansion of named-competent-person / signatory requirements into more maintenance domains: FAA Part 145 already requires a certificated Repair Station supervisor and an RII (Required Inspection Item) inspector to sign; FTA/state DOT bus and rail maintenance rules and elevator/boiler inspection codes name a licensed supervisor. If a state adopts mandatory heavy-vehicle inspection programs (as several have debated post-CVSA out-of-service data) that require a named supervisor's signature on brake and steering releases, or if EPA 608/609 refrigerant recovery enforcement pushes to a supervisor countersignature, the shield rises for those subsectors.
Two genuine tiers exist here. If maintenance platforms (Fleetio, UpKeep, ServiceTitan) absorb scheduling, warranty claims, and PM logs, the remaining job is verification-in-the-bay, tech coaching, and comeback root-cause — which raises task_resistance as a share of the job even as absolute headcount falls. Watch for shops where the foreman no longer touches the WO system at all.
Narrow route only: in high-stakes independent shops and specialty/vintage/heavy equipment work, customers ask for a specific named foreman to inspect. This is real but small and does not scale to fleet or dealer-network work, where the buyer is a procurement department indifferent to who signed.
The limit. The binding constraint is that the credential is experience, not a license — absent a genuine journeyman-supervisor licensure regime (which no US state body is currently moving toward for general mechanical trades), the shield stays capped in the low teens. Realistic ceiling around 72-75, and the gains come from concentration of accountability onto fewer supervisors rather than from protecting the current 617,500 headcount.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 24,570 | $97,560 +22% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 19,530 | $78,740 -1% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 19,390 | $78,250 -2% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 17,470 | $93,870 +18% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 12,920 | $78,310 -2% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 11,870 | $77,310 -3% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 11,630 | $85,420 +7% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 9,670 | $86,370 +8% |
| Bremerton-Silverdale-Port Orchard, WA | 1,020 | $120,040 +50% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2,360 | $104,070 +30% |
| Vallejo, CA | 630 | $102,840 +29% |
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 62. 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.