Most career advice tells you what a job pays or what a typical day looks like. Almost none of it tells you the one thing that matters most when you're choosing a path:
Is this career actually a good bet for the next 10–20 years?
We built a Career Health Score to answer that question — grading every career on our platform across four factors: future outlook, AI resilience, salary trajectory, and long-term sustainability. Here's what the data showed us.
How We Grade Careers
Each career receives a score out of 100 across four categories:
Scores of 85+ earn an A. Below 42 earns an F. Everything in between falls on a spectrum from stable to concerning.
The A-Grade Careers: What They Have in Common
The careers that scored highest share a consistent profile: strong and growing demand, work that requires human judgment and creativity that AI can support but not replace, salary that grows meaningfully from entry to senior level, and sustainable working conditions that allow long careers.
They tend to cluster in a few areas: technology roles that involve systems thinking and communication (not just coding), healthcare roles where human relationships are central to the work, engineering disciplines tied to physical infrastructure and complex problem-solving, and senior business roles where strategic judgment and stakeholder management are the core product.
- Demand driven by factors AI cannot fully replicate — judgment, relationships, physical presence
- Salary ceiling well above $150,000 with meaningful growth from entry level
- Future outlook score of 8+ out of 10 based on industry projections
- AI augments the work rather than replacing it — making practitioners more productive, not obsolete
The Surprising F-Grade Careers
Some of the lowest-scoring careers are ones that still attract large numbers of students and career changers — because the culture around them hasn't caught up with the data.
Careers that score poorly tend to share a different profile: high volumes of routine, repeatable tasks that AI handles increasingly well, limited salary growth from entry to ceiling, declining industry demand driven by technology or demographic shifts, and high stress with limited sustainability over a long career.
- Most tasks involve processing, sorting, routing, or generating standard content — all AI-automatable
- Salary ceiling below $70,000 with limited growth trajectory
- Industry employment declining in BLS projections
- High stress and burnout rates making long careers rare
The C-Grade Careers: The Ones to Watch
The most nuanced findings are in the C-grade careers — fields that are neither clearly strong nor clearly declining, but showing early warning signs that matter for long-term planning.
Many traditional white-collar roles fall here. Fields where AI is actively reshaping the work faster than practitioners are adapting. Careers where the entry-level work is highly automatable but senior roles remain strong — meaning the path through the field is getting harder even as the destination remains viable.
C-grade careers aren't necessarily bad choices, but they require strategic navigation: specializing early, building skills that resist automation, and avoiding the parts of the field where AI displacement is most advanced.
How to Use This for Your Own Decision
The grade is a starting point, not a verdict. A C-grade career that you're deeply suited for and passionate about may be a better choice than an A-grade career you'd be mediocre at. What the grades tell you is where the structural tailwinds and headwinds are — so you can make a more informed bet.
A few specific ways to use it:
If you're choosing between two similar careers — compare their grades. A one-letter difference often represents a meaningful difference in long-term demand and AI exposure.
If you're in a C or D-grade career — look at what makes adjacent A and B-grade careers score better. The difference is often specialization or a shift toward higher-judgment work within your existing field.
If you're advising a student — the grade is a useful gut-check before committing to a degree. An F-grade career at the end of a $120,000 degree is a compounding problem.