EXPOSED
The analytic half of this job — building pedigrees from intake forms, running Tyrer-Cuzick/BOADICEA risk models, pulling ClinVar and literature on a variant, drafting the clinic note and insurance pre-auth letter — is exactly what language models and lab decision-support tools now do at usable quality. What does not automate is sitting with a woman deciding whether to test her children for Huntington's, or delivering a VUS result to a family already primed for catastrophe, then owning that conversation clinically. Licensure exists in roughly two-thirds of states and ABGC certification gates hiring and billing, which slows substitution even where software could draft the answer.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $81,880 → $100,040 -2.3% 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
+9.3% 4,000 → 4,300 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +9.3% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 61/100 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.
~300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Clinical ReviewerGenetic CounselorGenetic CoordinatorMedical Science LiaisonCancer Genetic CounselorCancer Program ConsultantPrenatal Genetic CounselorCertified Genetic CounselorPediatric Genetic CounselorChromosomal Disorders CounselorMitochondrial Disorders CounselorGenetic Counseling Medical SpecialistPrenatal and Pediatric Genetic CounselorReproductive Genetic Counseling Coordinator
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: embodiment .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Pedigree construction, variant curation against ClinVar/ACMG criteria, risk-model runs and the pre-test/post-test letter are all now drafted competently by software, but the pre-test counseling session, the disclosure of a Huntington's or BRCA1 result, and the decision-making conversation about prenatal termination remain irreducibly live work — roughly half the caseload hours resist, which is what puts this at 11 rather than 6 or 15.
Some physical or field component You sit in a clinic room or on telehealth for most of the day, but you draw or order the blood, hand over the buccal swab kit, do the physical presence work at a fetal-anomaly consult alongside MFM, and read facial dysmorphology in person — physical, but controlled and incidental, hence 7 not 13.
Licensed human required and personally liable ABGC certification plus licensure in about two-thirds of states gates hiring and CPT 96040 billing, and you carry your own scope of practice for what you disclose — but you do not order the test independently in many settings, the ordering physician or lab director signs the report, so you sit at 12 rather than the 17 a prescribing clinician holds.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls You decide whether a 16-year-old is competent to consent to predictive testing, whether to recommend against testing at all, how to frame a VUS so a family doesn't pursue prophylactic mastectomy on nothing, and whether to breach confidentiality to warn an at-risk relative — ambiguous calls with irreversible consequences, though ACMG/NSGC practice guidelines and tumor-board consensus constrain them enough to hold this below 17.
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 (12/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (17/20) 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 43 of this occupation's 61 points (70%).
Embodiment (7/20) 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 75/100 — SAFE.
Task-mix shift: the pedigree/risk-model/ClinVar-lookup/letter-drafting tier is genuinely separable from the disclosure tier. If labs and health systems formally reassign the analytic tier to software plus genetic assistants (already happening at Myriad, Invitae-successor operations and telehealth GC vendors), the residual job is predictive-testing decisions, VUS and incidental-finding disclosure, reproductive decision-making and family cascade coordination — which current models do not do at usable quality
Expansion of population and prenatal screening (cfDNA, newborn genomic sequencing pilots, employer/payer hereditary cancer panels) pushing high-ambiguity caseload — incidental findings, discordant results, non-paternity, penetrance uncertainty — onto the GC as the named decision owner rather than the physician
Genetic counselor licensure completing across the remaining states (NSGC's Access to Genetic Counselor Services Act push, plus state bills like those passed in NY 2022 and Michigan) combined with CMS finalizing genetic counselors as independently billable Medicare providers — which would make a certified GC's signature, not an ordering physician's, the legally accountable one on the interpretation and disclosure
A CAP/ACMG or state lab-licensing rule requiring a board-certified genetic counselor or clinical geneticist to countersign AI- or pipeline-generated variant classifications and reportable secondary findings before release to the ordering clinician
Already near ceiling at 17. The only remaining route is a payer or accreditation requirement that pre-test counseling for predictive/presymptomatic testing be delivered by a human GC rather than a chatbot or video module — e.g. a Huntington's or BRCA testing coverage condition written into commercial policy
The limit. Embodiment has no plausible route — the work is conversation and records, and telehealth delivery is already normal. Total realistic headroom is bounded by the profession's small size: 3,740 workers means state-by-state licensure and CMS recognition depend on one advocacy organization's capacity, and a single adverse CMS decision on independent billing caps the liability_shield gain regardless of clinical reality.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 390 | $109,130 +9% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 180 | $97,240 -3% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 130 | $120,560 +21% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 130 | $106,010 +6% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 120 | $177,990 +78% |
| Pittsburgh, PA | 100 | $99,030 -1% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 80 | $95,880 -4% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 80 | $102,010 +2% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 120 | $177,990 +78% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 80 | $165,920 +66% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 130 | $120,560 +21% |
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 61. 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.