HUMANPLACE

Occupation

Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers

Assess and treat individuals with mental, emotional, or substance abuse problems, including abuse of alcohol, tobacco, and/or other drugs. Activities may include individual and group therapy, crisis intervention, case management, client advocacy, prevention, and education.

90 AI exposure
27 Human advantage
66 Market demand
62 AI leverage

Is Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers a safe career from AI?

Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers scores 90 out of 100 for AI exposure, which is high. A large share of this work is the kind current AI systems are measurably good at. That is not a prediction the job disappears, and the research does not support one. It means more of this role is likely to change than most.

Its human advantage score is 27, which is low. Most of this role can be done through a screen, and that is the half of the labor market AI has reached first. Market demand scores 66 out of 100, combining how many of these jobs exist with where that number is heading. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment growing 10.3% over ten years.

What Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers pay

The median wage is $60,060 a year. The lower quarter earns under $46,550 and the upper quarter over $78,980. About 125,910 people do this work in the United States.

Where Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers can go next

Occupations that share most of what this job already requires, ranked by how much carries over.

Physician Assistants 93% of the skills carry over $133k median
Clinical Neuropsychologists 92% of the skills carry over $118k median
Family Medicine Physicians 84% of the skills carry over $238k median
General Internal Medicine Physicians 84% of the skills carry over $236k median

Thinking about moving out of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Social Workers?

Answer three questions and see which jobs you could move into, what carries over from your own experience, and who is hiring.

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Where this comes from

Work content and transitions from O*NET, the US Department of Labor's occupational database. Wages and employment projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. AI exposure from published research measuring which occupations current AI capabilities overlap with. None of it is a forecast, and none of these numbers are ours: they are public data, put next to each other.

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