School and Career Counselor
| Median wage (USD) | 64330 |
|---|---|
| Projected employment growth (%) | 3 |
| AI exposure (%) | 32 |
| Maximum exposure (%) | 40 |
| Source | eloundou |
| What AI changes in this occupation | Keeping the student records required by law and district policy, checking transcripts against graduation requirements, drafting letters of recommendation and the reports administration asks for, and looking up information on programs, financial aid and admission requirements are moving to tools that draft, check and summarize: the documentation side of the job is the share being delegated first Students now arrive with AI-drafted career plans and applications, which shifts the conversation towards checking the reasoning and the coherence of the plan; interest and aptitude tests are partly scored and interpreted automatically; and access to the counselor is split between in-person appointments, messaging and online guidance platforms The conversation in which a student finally says what they could not put into words, stepping in when something serious happens at school, reading a family situation, meeting worried parents and following a young person over several years remain human — the relationship is what makes the counselling, and it is what decides whether the student comes back |
| Key skills | Counselling interview and active listening · assessment of interests, aptitudes and personality · knowledge of degree programs, admission requirements and financial aid · educational and career information · job search techniques (resume, application, interview) · crisis intervention and referral to appropriate services · collaboration with families, the school and outside professionals · record keeping and confidentiality ethics · AI tools for documentation and information retrieval |
| Courses to get ahead | Career Planning: A Pathway to Employment · Coursera (Kennesaw State University) · About 25 hours in total · 90 · The course that matches the core of the job as AI takes it over: building a career plan from the programs available, admission requirements and actual job prospects. It comes from a university that teaches it to its own students, and it covers precisely the share of the job that is delegated — the information and the method, not the relationship. Writing Winning Resumes and Cover Letters · Coursera (University of Maryland, College Park) · About 16 hours in total · 87 · The counselor teaches students application techniques; this University of Maryland course is the tooled-up version of that gesture — resume structure, a letter tailored to the posting, revision. It is the task a language model already drafts in the student's place, and the counselor needs to be able to correct it rather than produce it. AI For Everyone · Coursera (DeepLearning.AI) · About 7 hours in total · 84 · For deciding what to delegate and what to keep: the course explains what generative AI can do, where it fails and how to frame a project that uses it. A counselor who keeps the records, the transcripts and the reports needs to know what these tools actually produce — and what they cannot check. Psychological First Aid · Coursera (Johns Hopkins University) · About 6 hours in total · 83 Understanding child development: from synapse to society · Coursera (Utrecht University) · About 28 hours in total · 81 Introduction to Psychology · Coursera (Yale University) · About 18 hours in total · 79 |
| Occupations to pivot toward | Rehabilitation Counselor · 46850 · 2 · 47 Training and Development Specialist · 69280 · 11 · 59 Social and Community Service Manager · 80390 · 7 · 45 |
| Skills to acquire for the pivot | Eloundou measures the school and career counselor's exposure at 32% (human β) and up to 40% (human ζ): keeping the student records required by law and district policy, checking transcripts against graduation requirements, drafting letters of recommendation and the reports administration asks for, looking up information on programs, financial aid and admission requirements, and teaching application techniques are largely delegable to AI, but the counselling interview, crisis intervention, assessment of interests and aptitudes, meeting parents and following a young person over several years remain human. Within the repository, 32 puts the counselor just above the accounting clerk and the nurse practitioner (31) and just below the teacher and the physiotherapist (34): thirty of the ninety-one occupations already published sit lower, and one has to go down to the trades — roofer (0), welder (4), plumber (6) — to find lower values. The explanation lies in the material of the work: this job is made of conversations and situations, not documents, even though its documentation share is real and is genuinely shifting. The GPT-4 self-rated series (β 29, ζ 53) is kept in expositionGpt4 and is not displayed, in line with the decision of 21 August 2026. BLS projects 3% growth in school and career counselor and advisor employment from 2025 to 2035 — exactly the average pace for all occupations — with about 27,800 openings a year over the decade, most of them replacing people who leave the occupation or the labour force rather than new positions. Two drivers are cited: schools hire counselors to respond to students' academic, social and career-planning needs, and colleges and universities open career centres to prepare students to enter the workforce; BLS adds that these counselors will also be needed by jobseekers — career changers, laid-off workers, military veterans. The ζ of 40% says a little over a third of the job is at least partly transformable, but hiring depends first on public education budgets and student numbers, not on the speed of AI. O*NET, for its part, puts employment at 376,300 people in 2024 and 31,000 projected openings over 2024-2034, with growth rated "average (3% to 4%)" — consistent with the BLS figure, and consistent too with the fact that this occupation is not shrinking, unlike high school teaching (-2%). The occupation's median salary is $64,330 a year, the May 2025 figure from the BLS OEWS survey published on the Occupational Outlook Handbook page "School and Career Counselors and Advisors" — $30.93 an hour, with 10% of workers below $45,020 and 10% above $104,770. That figure hides wide differences by employer: $77,800 in public elementary and secondary schools, $62,190 in private schools, $58,870 in public colleges and universities, $57,480 in other private educational services. For context, in the same May 2025 snapshot: all occupations stand at $50,980, rehabilitation counselors at $46,850, training and development specialists at $69,280 and social and community service managers at $80,390 — the three pivots offered on this card. The job usually requires a master's degree in school counseling or a related field and a state-issued credential; O*NET places it in "Job Zone Five: Extensive Preparation Needed". The pay ceiling comes from directing a guidance service, moving into private practice or shifting towards counselling psychology, not from the number of students followed. Every value on this card comes from a named source; none is left as an estimate. |
| GPT-4 exposure — beta / zeta (%) | 29 · 53 |