HUMANPLACE

Occupation

Sheet Metal Workers

Fabricate, assemble, install, and repair sheet metal products and equipment, such as ducts, control boxes, drainpipes, and furnace casings. Work may involve any of the following: setting up and operating fabricating machines to cut, bend, and straighten sheet metal; shaping metal over anvils, blocks, or forms using hammer; operating soldering and welding equipment to join sheet metal parts; or inspecting, assembling, and smoothing seams and joints of burred surfaces. Includes sheet metal duct installers who install prefabricated sheet metal ducts used for heating, air conditioning, or other purposes.

36 AI exposure
55 Human advantage
59 Market demand
45 AI leverage

Is Sheet Metal Workers a safe career from AI?

Sheet Metal Workers scores 36 out of 100 for AI exposure, which is low. Most of what this job involves is not the kind of task current AI systems are good at, largely because it happens in a physical place rather than on a screen.

Its human advantage score is 55. There is a real physical and in-person component to this work, alongside a good deal that could be done from anywhere. Market demand scores 59 out of 100, combining how many of these jobs exist with where that number is heading. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment roughly flat over ten years.

What Sheet Metal Workers pay

The median wage is $60,850 a year. The lower quarter earns under $47,290 and the upper quarter over $79,620. About 117,470 people do this work in the United States.

Where Sheet Metal Workers can go next

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

Roofers 88% of the skills carry over $51k median
Helpers, Electricians 92% of the skills carry over $40k median
Wind Turbine Service Technicians 77% of the skills carry over $63k median
Electricians 84% of the skills carry over $62k median

Thinking about moving out of Sheet Metal Workers?

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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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