Special Education Teachers, Secondary School
The routine layer of this job is compressing.
A substantial share of this occupation's activities overlaps with what AI already does well. Expect the routine layer to compress first, and the human-anchored layer to gain weight and value.
Where this occupation sits among all 785 measured. Bands are quintiles of the real distribution. Applicability measures task overlap with observed AI usage. It is not a probability of job loss.
What this job involves
Teach academic, social, and life skills to secondary school students with learning, emotional, or physical disabilities. Includes teachers who specialize and work with students who are blind or have visual impairments; students who are deaf or have hearing impairments; and students with intellectual disabilities.
Where AI overlaps this work, activity by activity
The occupation's most important work activities (O*NET weights, normalized to this set), each with its measured AI performance across 200,000 real conversations: how often AI is used for it, how well it completes it, and how much of the activity it covers.
| Work activity | Share of role | AI performance |
|---|---|---|
| Develop educational programs, plans, or procedures. | 25.0% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Advise others on educational or vocational matters. | 11.3% | High overlap 0.70 |
| Prepare informational or instructional materials. | 8.8% | High overlap 0.73 |
| Assess student capabilities, needs, or performance. | 8.8% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Teach life skills. | 8.6% | Moderate 0.56 |
| Collaborate in the development of educational programs. | 7.6% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Monitor individual behavior or performance. | 6.9% | Moderate 0.45 |
| Communicate with others about operational plans or activities. | 6.6% | High overlap 0.61 |
| Teach academic or vocational subjects. | 5.8% | High overlap 0.62 |
| Develop safety standards, policies, or procedures. | 3.6% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Maintain operational records. | 3.5% | Not observed 0.00 |
| Prepare reports of operational or procedural activities. | 3.5% | Not observed 0.00 |
"Not observed" is a measurement, not missing data: that activity does not meaningfully appear in the usage sample. AI performance = completion × scope × coverage (user-goal view), 0–1.
What drives this score: the biggest AI-overlapped activity in this role is advise others on educational or vocational matters; the most important activity AI is not observed doing is develop educational programs, plans, or procedures. The plan below is built around exactly that split.
Move first: compress the routine before it compresses you.
Next 30 days
- Take the exposed layer yourself. Your most AI-overlapped activity, Advise others on educational or vocational matters, is exactly what a well-tooled colleague will accelerate. Be that colleague first.
- Time-box the routine. Measure how long your repeatable tasks actually take; that's the budget AI adoption will compete against, and the time you will reinvest.
Next 90 days
- Double down where humans hold. Grow the share of your week spent on work like Develop educational programs, plans, or procedures, measured as outside AI's current reach, and take on more of it explicitly.
- Build one AI-assisted workflow end-to-end for your team and own its quality. Being the local standard-setter compounds.
The longer game
- Position at the boundary. The valuable seat in partially-exposed occupations is the translator: someone fluent in both the domain and the tools. Certifications matter less than a demonstrated workflow portfolio.
- Recheck yearly. Elevated-band occupations move: new tools shift specific activities fast. The data vintage is printed at the top of this page.
- AI applicability score and per-activity metrics: Tomlinson, Jaffe, Wang, Counts & Suri, Working with AI: Measuring the Applicability of Generative AI to Occupations, Microsoft Research 2025 (arXiv:2507.07935), data CC BY 4.0.
- Occupation description and activity structure: O*NET 30.0 Database, USDOL/ETA, CC BY 4.0.
- Bands, personalization weights and action plans are JobRiskAI editorial layers; method and limitations on the methodology page.