EXPOSED
The hands-on core — laying out, machining, fitting, and hand-finishing wood, metal, and plastic patterns and core boxes to shrinkage and draft allowances — is skilled physical work that AI and current robotics cannot replicate. The exposure is upstream and structural: pattern geometry, shrink factors, and gating layout increasingly come out of CAD/CAM and solidification simulation, and additive manufacturing plus printed sand molds bypass the physical pattern entirely. This occupation isn't being automated task-by-task so much as engineered around, and at 1,470 US jobs the shrinkage is already far along.
Part 2020 shock, part continued decline in the years since.
Median pay $46,910 → $58,000 -1.1% 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
-24.4% 1,600 → 1,200 on the projections basis
Exposed, and shrinking
Both signals point the same way: the tasks are largely automatable and the BLS projects -24.4% 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.
~100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
LoftsmanWax MolderMold ToolerChart WriterPatternmakerDie InspectorPattern MakerStencil MakerDie TechnicianPattern CutterPattern FitterPattern WorkerStencil CutterTemplate MakerFixture BuilderPattern CheckerPattern MechanicLayout TechnicianPattern DeveloperPattern ScratcherDie Cast Die MakerMetal PatternmakerMetal Pattern MakerSample Patternmaker
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 12 the split is real: CAD-driven CNC and 3D-printed cores have taken over the layout math, shrink scaling, and roughing that used to be your bench work, but chaplet placement, matchplate fitting, draft correction after a foundry rejects a casting, and hand-rubbing a pattern to a finish still need someone at the bench with a rasp and a straightedge — that's why it isn't 6, and why it isn't 16 either.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments 16 reflects that you work inside a foundry pattern shop: mill and lathe setups, band saw and router work, lifting and clamping half-patterns and core boxes, checking parting lines against a plate by feel, and troubleshooting on the foundry floor where sand, heat, and a live mold line are the environment — not a fixture-controlled cell a robot can be taught once.
No licence, no signature requirement 1 because nothing in the pattern shop requires a licence — no state board, no stamped drawing, no certification a customer must see; the foundry's engineer or the casting buyer's spec owns the consequences if a shrink allowance is wrong, and your protection is your reputation and your journeyman background, neither of which is a legal barrier to anyone replacing you.
Meaningful discretion 8 fits because you make consequential calls that aren't in a procedure — how much extra stock to leave for machining, where to break a pattern for draw, whether a section will trap sand — but you make them against established shrink tables, industry allowances, and a print someone else approved, so the ambiguity is bounded and the expensive decisions about alloy and casting design sit upstream of your bench.
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 (12/20 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 (1/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (5/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (8/20) 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 14 of this occupation's 42 points (33%).
Embodiment (16/20) 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 52/100, still EXPOSED.
Task-mix shift as CAD/CAM and printed sand molds absorb the routine new-pattern work, leaving the residual job as repair, rework and reverse-engineering of legacy patterns with no digital model — hand-fitting worn core boxes, correcting castings that came out of tolerance, and salvaging tooling for obsolete parts where scanning plus print is uneconomic at lot size one. Watch for shop advertising shifting from 'pattern fabrication' to 'tooling repair and reverse engineering'.
Where the patternmaker becomes the person who owns shrink, draft and gating calls that simulation flags ambiguously — signing off on first-article tooling before a five-figure casting run — the role absorbs consequential-call ownership formerly held by a foundry engineer. Recognisable as patternmakers named on AS9100/PPAP first-article approval records rather than only as fabricators.
If defense and nuclear-component casting reshoring (DPA Title III foundry grants, Navy submarine industrial base castings funding) sustains demand for large, one-off match plates and core boxes in materials and sizes outside printed-sand build envelopes, the surviving work is disproportionately the unpredictable hand-fitting tier.
Narrow route only: restoration and heritage casting (architectural ironwork, historic machinery, art foundry) where clients specify hand-carved wood patterns as part of the commission. Real but tiny, and cannot absorb the industrial workforce.
The limit. No plausible liability route: patternmaking is unlicensed and liability sits with the foundry and design engineer, not the patternmaker. And no lever addresses the core problem — the occupation is shrinking because the artifact itself is being bypassed by printed sand and additive tooling, not because tasks are being automated. Higher scores here would describe a smaller, more defensible remnant, not a stable occupation.
| Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI | 110 | $49,070 -15% |
| Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI | 100 | $48,790 -16% |
| Birmingham, AL | 70 | $62,390 +8% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 50 | $74,900 +29% |
| Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ | 40 | $54,980 -5% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 50 | $74,900 +29% |
| Birmingham, AL | 70 | $62,390 +8% |
| Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ | 40 | $54,980 -5% |
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 42. 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.