EXPOSED
The bread-and-butter of this job — account provisioning, patch cycles, log triage, backup verification, firewall rule edits, ticket resolution, runbook writing — is exactly what infrastructure-as-code, cloud managed services, and AI copilots are absorbing fastest; the same wave that killed manual server builds is now eating first-line troubleshooting. What holds is the physical and organizational half: racking and cabling gear, chasing an intermittent switch or AP problem across a building, restoring service at 2am when the automation itself is the thing that broke, and being the person accountable for an outage or a breach. No license protects this work, which is why the ceiling is modest.
This fall is concentrated in 2020 and has not recovered since.
Median pay $83,510 → $99,130 -5.0% 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
-4.2% 331,500 → 317,700 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -4.2% by 2034. This is the case where the score and the forecast agree, and it is the one worth taking seriously.
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.
~14,300 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
Network ManagerSoftware ManagerSystems OperatorSystems SpecialistInformation AnalystNetwork CoordinatorServer AdministratorNetwork AdministratorWindows AdministratorSecurity AdministratorNetwork Control AnalystNetwork Support ManagerVirtualization EngineerInstallation CoordinatorNetworking AdministratorProvider Network ManagerInternetwork Expert (CCIE)E-Mail System AdministratorNetwork Professional (CCNP)Network Support CoordinatorNetwork Systems CoordinatorInformation Systems OperatorSystems Tester AdministratorNetwork Support Administrator
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 9 the split is real but lopsided: Ansible/Terraform, Intune, and cloud consoles already handle the provisioning, imaging, patch rings, and certificate renewals that used to fill the week, while the residue that resists — reverse-engineering an undocumented legacy dependency, diagnosing why VLAN 40 drops at 4pm, deciding what to sacrifice during a partial SAN failure — is maybe a third of the calendar, not enough for a 14.
Some physical or field component A 9 reflects that you do rack switches, run and label patch cables, swap failed drives and PSUs, walk floors with a laptop hunting an AP coverage hole, and drive to the branch office when the VPN appliance bricks — but that's in server rooms, IDF closets, and offices with climate control and known layouts, not rooftops or trenches, and most days you never leave your desk.
No licence, no signature requirement A 2 is honest: no state licenses systems administrators, and CCNA, MCSE, RHCE, or Security+ are hiring filters set by employers, not legal gatekeepers — after a breach the notification duty and the fines land on the organization and its CISO under HIPAA, GLBA, or state law, and your exposure is being fired, not being sanctioned by a board.
Meaningful discretion A 12 fits calls that are yours alone with no procedure to hide behind — whether to fail over or wait, whether to isolate an infected subnet and halt a department, which backup generation to trust when the newest one may be encrypted, whether to push an emergency patch on a Friday — but the change window, the RTO, and the risk appetite were set above you, which keeps it out of the 14-plus range.
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 (9/20 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 (2/20) 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 (12/20) 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 22 of this occupation's 40 points (55%).
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.
Electrical 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 55/100, still EXPOSED.
Incident-command accountability being formalized: SEC cyber disclosure rules (Item 1.05, effective Dec 2023) and NYDFS Part 500 amendments require a named individual to certify materiality and control effectiveness within days of an incident. If the person who owns the environment is routinely the attestor of record — as CISOs increasingly delegate technical certification downward — the role owns consequential calls with personal exposure.
Genuine two-tier shift: as IaC and AI copilots absorb provisioning, patching, and first-line ticket triage, the residual work becomes failure-domain design, blast-radius review of AI-generated config changes, and recovering when the automation itself is the failure (the CrowdStrike July 2024 pattern). Watch for job postings retitled toward platform/reliability engineering with change-review duties.
Narrow route only: classified, ITAR, or CJIS-scoped environments where cleared US-person administrators are contractually mandated and offshore or AI-mediated administration is barred. This is a compliance mandate that reads as trust premium, not buyer preference.
AI-driven datacenter buildout raising the share of hands-on work: power, cooling, GPU cluster cabling, and optics fault isolation in facilities where remote hands cannot diagnose intermittent physical-layer faults. Also OT/air-gapped environments under CISA critical-infrastructure guidance where remote administration is prohibited by policy.
The only credible route is cyber-insurance underwriting, not licensure: carriers already require MFA and EDR attestations signed by a named administrator, and a false attestation can void coverage. If insurers move to requiring a named, credentialed individual (CISSP-level or equivalent) to sign control attestations — as some CMMC Level 2 assessments already do for defense contractors — a weak personal-liability hook appears.
The limit. Even with every lever, this caps in the low-to-mid 50s. There is no licensing body, no protected title, and no path to one — attempts to license IT practitioners have repeatedly failed in the US. Most gains come from task-mix shift and insurer attestation, both of which shrink headcount while raising the value of survivors.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 17,690 | $119,390 +20% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 11,740 | $103,260 +4% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 9,920 | $125,430 +27% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 8,770 | $106,290 +7% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 6,950 | $103,170 +4% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 6,760 | $116,770 +18% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 6,340 | $97,180 -2% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 6,330 | $101,430 +2% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 2,460 | $133,360 +35% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 3,910 | $129,680 +31% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 9,920 | $125,430 +27% |
City of Charlotte, North Carolina
GovTech reports that IT staff at the University of California have unionized, with concerns about AI-driven changes to their jobs cited as a motivation.
GovTech reports the city government of Charlotte, North Carolina has made AI and cloud computing certifications a requirement for its IT staff.
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