Occupation
Telephone Operators
Provide information by accessing alphabetical, geographical, or other directories. Assist customers with special billing requests, such as charges to a third party and credits or refunds for incorrectly dialed numbers or bad connections. May handle emergency calls and assist children or people with physical disabilities to make telephone calls.
Is Telephone Operators a safe career from AI?
Telephone Operators scores 88 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 25 out of 100, combining how many of these jobs exist with where that number is heading. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment falling 27.6% over ten years.
What Telephone Operators pay
The median wage is $39,130 a year. The lower quarter earns under $35,860 and the upper quarter over $48,530. About 3,950 people do this work in the United States.
Where Telephone Operators can go next
Occupations that share most of what this job already requires, ranked by how much carries over.
Thinking about moving out of Telephone Operators?
Answer three questions and see which jobs you could move into, what carries over from your own experience, and who is hiring.
Show me where to goWhere 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.