Job Check
Social Work Teachers, Postsecondary
Teach courses in social work. Includes both teachers primarily engaged in teaching and those who do a combination of teaching and research.
10 main tasks · most important first
Your main tasks and AI
Importance- 01Initiate, facilitate, and moderate classroom discussions.Mostly human for now
- 02Prepare course materials, such as syllabi, homework assignments, or handouts.AI could speed this up a lot
- 03Compile, administer, and grade examinations, or assign this work to others.People already use AI for this at work
- 04Supervise students' laboratory and field work.Mostly human for now
- 05Prepare and deliver lectures to undergraduate or graduate students on topics such as family behavior, child and adolescent mental health, or social intervention evaluation.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 06Supervise undergraduate or graduate teaching, internship, and research work.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
- 07Evaluate and grade students' class work, assignments, and papers.People already use AI for this at work
- 08Plan, evaluate, and revise curricula, course content, course materials, and methods of instruction.People already use AI for this at work
- 09Keep abreast of developments in the field by reading current literature, talking with colleagues, and participating in professional conferences.People already use AI for this at work
- 10Collaborate with colleagues and community agencies to address teaching and research issues.AI could speed this up, with extra tools
Tasks from O*NET® 31.0 (US Department of Labor, CC BY 4.0, changed by us), most important first. “Already use” comes from Anthropic’s data on real work chats with Claude; “could speed up” from task ratings made with GPT-4 in 2023.
Four studies, side by side
None is a forecast of job lossToo little dataNot enough work use was seen to measure. This does not mean the job is safe from AI.Anthropic, 2026
42%of this job’s tasks an AI model could do in half the time, counting tasks that need extra tools as half (rated in 2023).Eloundou, Manning, Mishkin and Rock, 2023
Above 93% of jobsin how often and how well AI helped with this job’s work in Microsoft Copilot chats (2024 data).Microsoft Research (Tomlinson et al.), 2025
Your human edge
The main tasks with no real AI use seen and no big speed-up expected. This is where your skill counts most today.
- Initiate, facilitate, and moderate classroom discussions.
- Supervise students' laboratory and field work.