EXPOSED
The modal mechanical engineer splits time between screen work that AI is rapidly absorbing — CAD modeling, tolerance stacks, FEA/CFD setup, spec and report writing, BOM and vendor comparison — and physical work that it cannot: standing at a test rig figuring out why the prototype cracked, walking a factory line, arguing with a supplier about what is actually manufacturable. Licensure is a real but partial shield: PE stamps matter in HVAC/building systems, pressure vessels, and forensic work, while most manufacturing and product engineers operate under the industrial exemption with no signature requirement. What survives is ownership of design decisions whose failure mode is injury, recall, or a shut-down production line.
Roughly flat across the period, with year-to-year wobble.
Median pay $88,430 → $104,110 -5.8% 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
+9.1% 293,100 → 319,600 on the projections basis
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +9.1% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 48/100 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.
~18,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
EngineerTool MakerCar DesignerBody EngineerTest EngineerTool DesignerTool EngineerBrake EngineerPlant EngineerRelay EngineerStack EngineerStress AnalystDesign EngineerDiesel EngineerEngine DesignerSystem EngineerChassis EngineerHeating EngineerProduct EngineerProject EngineerQuality EngineerTextile EngineerTooling EngineerWeapons Designer
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: trust premium .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Parametric CAD generation, tolerance stack-ups, mesh setup and load-case sweeps in FEA/CFD, and drafting of test reports and ECOs are now largely toolable, but root-causing a fatigue crack on a bench fixture, judging whether a supplier's process can actually hold ±0.05 mm, and re-designing around a late vendor change keep this at 10 rather than 6 — roughly half the week is still hands-and-eyes on real hardware.
Some physical or field component Most hours are at a workstation, with recurring but scheduled physical work: prototype teardowns, instrumenting a test rig with strain gauges and thermocouples, first-article inspections, and factory or field trips for commissioning or failure investigation — that intermittent, mostly indoor-controlled exposure is a 9, not the 15+ of a millwright who lives in the plant.
Certification preferred, not legally required The industrial exemption in nearly every state means product, automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing MEs design safety-critical parts without ever holding a licence, so the 8 reflects the minority who do stamp — HVAC and plumbing drawings for permit, ASME Section VIII pressure vessel and B31 piping calcs, elevator and boiler work, forensic testimony — plus the FE/PE track being a real promotion gate in consulting.
Meaningful discretion You sign off on the safety factor, the derating, the accepted deviation, and the decision to ship with a known open issue; a wrong call surfaces as a warranty spike, a CPSC recall, an OSHA-reportable injury, or a line down at $10k+/hour, and the 13 rather than 17 reflects that codes and standards — ASME, ISO 13849, FMVSS, internal design guides — bound most of those calls before you make them.
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 (10/20 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 (8/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (8/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (13/20) 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 29 of this occupation's 48 points (60%).
Embodiment (9/20) 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.
Civil Engineers EXPOSED
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 66/100, still EXPOSED.
Genuine two-tier structure: if CAD modeling, drawing production, mesh setup, BOM comparison and spec drafting are absorbed, the residual role is failure-mode reasoning at the rig, design-intent definition, and supplier manufacturability negotiation — tasks whose inputs are undocumented and physical. Task-mix shift alone raises this without any new rule; watch whether job postings shift from 'proficient in SolidWorks/ANSYS' to 'owns validation and root-cause'.
Insurer/underwriter requirements rather than law: professional liability and product recall carriers writing policy conditions that AI-generated FEA/CFD or tolerance analysis must be independently verified and signed by a named engineer to preserve coverage. Already emerging in E&O endorsements excluding unverified generative-AI output.
Narrowing or repeal of the industrial exemption in state engineering practice acts, so products and manufacturing equipment sold to the public require a PE of record. NCEES has repeatedly pushed model-law language toward this; individual state boards (e.g. proposals debated in Texas and North Carolina after industrial-exemption fights) are the concrete place to watch. Also live: ASME BPVC and B31 code updates, and post-Boeing FAA rules on Organization Designation Authorization requiring a named licensed engineer to sign design substantiation rather than a delegated engineering unit.
Regulatory or customer-driven growth in physical verification: NHTSA/FAA/FDA insistence on hardware test evidence over simulation credit for safety-critical claims, which pushes engineer hours toward instrumented rigs, DVP&R execution and factory acceptance testing. Reinforced if ASME V&V 10/40 simulation-credibility standards get cited in acceptance criteria.
Formal named-accountability regimes for design decisions: EU Machinery Regulation 2023/1230 and the General Product Safety Regulation requiring an identifiable responsible person for technical files, plus post-737-MAX corporate practice of naming a design-authority engineer per subsystem. Makes the consequential call attributable to a person rather than a team.
The limit. Trust premium has no realistic route — buyers of mechanical designs purchase parts that work, not human authorship, and no segment pays a markup for a human-drawn model. Also, most of the shield levers help engineers in HVAC, pressure vessels, aerospace and forensics; a product engineer at a consumer-goods firm under the industrial exemption may see none of them, and the exemption has survived every repeal attempt for fifty years because manufacturers lobby hard for it.
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 22,500 | $109,470 +5% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 8,780 | $123,900 +19% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 8,310 | $125,350 +20% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 6,960 | $109,990 +6% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 6,900 | $102,070 -2% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 6,890 | $119,300 +15% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 5,600 | $105,420 +1% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 5,540 | $168,030 +61% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 5,540 | $168,030 +61% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 5,150 | $161,370 +55% |
| Baton Rouge, LA | 540 | $135,530 +30% |
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 48. 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.