Assist students with special educational needs.
Little of this can be handed to software today.
The documentation around care is highly automatable and that is where the time goes back. The care itself needs physical presence and someone accountable for the outcome, so this work stays where it is.
| How automatable | Barely automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Direct care and assistance |
| Jobs that do it | 18 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents |
| O*NET activity | Assisting and Caring for Others (4.A.4.a.5) |
What could do this work.
These are the categories of tool that address direct care and assistance, with a few live examples from our landscape. We name the category rather than promise that a specific product does your specific task, because that promise would not be true.
Vertical agents
Categories are matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Before committing to any of them, check that the tool can reach the system your record actually lives in. That connection, not the model, is where most of these projects stall.
Who does this work.
18 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Adapted Physical Education Specialists
- Adult Basic Education, Adult Secondary Education, and English as a Second Language Instructors
- Career/Technical Education Teachers, Middle School
- Career/Technical Education Teachers, Secondary School
- Elementary School Teachers, Except Special Education
- Kindergarten Teachers, Except Special Education
- Middle School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education
- Preschool Teachers, Except Special Education
- School Bus Monitors
- Secondary School Teachers, Except Special and Career/Technical Education
- Special Education Teachers, Elementary School
- Special Education Teachers, Kindergarten
- Special Education Teachers, Middle School
- Special Education Teachers, Preschool
- Special Education Teachers, Secondary School
- Speech-Language Pathologists
- Substitute Teachers, Short-Term
- Teaching Assistants, Special Education
Work that goes with it.
O*NET groups these under “Assist individuals with special needs”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.