EXPOSED
The document half of this job — drafting brochures, translating materials to plain language, writing curricula, summarizing survey data, assembling grant narratives and program reports — is exactly what generative AI does cheaply and at volume. What holds is the in-person, relationship-carrying half: facilitating workshops in churches, clinics, schools and shelters, running health fairs, and being the trusted local face who gets a skeptical community to show up. CHES/MCHES certification is preferred by employers but almost never legally mandated, so there is no licensure moat, and most positions sit in grant-funded public health and hospital budgets that are politically fragile.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. At 9 the split is roughly even: needs assessments, curriculum drafts, plain-language rewrites at 6th-grade reading level, BRFSS/YRBS data summaries and grant progress reports are now first-draft work for a model, while running an eight-week diabetes self-management series in a church basement, recruiting promotores, and staffing a health fair table still require a person in the room — which is why this sits above a pure documentation role but well below a home visitor.
Some physical or field component. An 8 reflects that the workshops, screenings, school assemblies and mobile-unit outreach happen in borrowed spaces you don't control — church halls, shelters, county fairgrounds, with your own boxes of BP cuffs and handouts — but you are not performing clinical procedures or entering unsafe structures, and a growing share of your hours are spent at a desk on Canva, Qualtrics and the county's reporting portal.
No licence, no signature requirement. A 3 is what CHES/MCHES actually buys: it appears in job postings and NCHEC exam eligibility rules, but no state practice act reserves health education to certificate holders, nothing you produce requires your credential number on it, and when a program's claims go wrong the liability lands on the health department, hospital, or the licensed clinician who reviewed the content.
Some relationship component. An 11 recognizes that in immigrant, faith, and rural communities the reason people attend is that they know you personally — you drove them, you speak the language, you were at the funeral — but the employer's contracts are with the CDC, HRSA, or a state grant, the client is a population rather than a named individual, and when you leave the grant hires a replacement educator and the program continues.
Meaningful discretion. An 8 fits work bounded by evidence-based interventions from the CDC Compendium, IRB protocols, and grant workplans you must implement with fidelity, while still requiring real calls on how to adapt a curriculum for a distrustful community, when a participant's disclosure triggers a mandated report or referral, and which of three neighborhoods gets the remaining outreach dollars.
Rehabilitation Counselors EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?