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Technicians and associate professionals · code 3222

Midwifery associate professionals

An app can answer questions at 3am. It can't be in the room during labour.

AI barely touches three of the four tasks: watching over pregnancy and labour, delivering babies, and caring for mums and newborns. Giving health advice is mostly out of its reach too.

What they actually do (and what else they get called)

Midwifery associate professionals provide basic health care and advice before, during and after pregnancy and childbirth. They implement care, treatment and referral plans usually established by medical, midwifery and other health professionals. Tasks include - (a) providing advice to women, families and communities on health, nutrition, hygiene, exercise, birth and emergency plans, breastfeeding, infant care, family planning and contraception, lifestyle and other topics related to pregnancy and childbirth; (b) assessing progress during pregnancy and childbirth, and recognizing signs and symptoms requiring referral to a health professional; (c) providing delivery care, usually only in the absence of identified potential complications, or assisting medical doctors or midwifery professionals with delivery care; (d) providing care and support to women and newborns following childbirth, monitoring their health status, and identifying signs and symptoms requiring referral to a health professional. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Assistant midwife - Traditional midwife Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Clinical nurse consultant - 2221 - Professional nurse - 2221 - Specialist nurse - 2221 - Professional midwife - 2222 - Birth assistant - 5321 Notes This unit group includes occupations for which competent performance requires knowledge and skills in routine and emergency midwifery care acquired through formal or informal training. The criteria for inclusion of individuals in this unit group should be based on the nature of the work performed in relation to the tasks specified in this definition, and not the qualifications held by individuals or that predominate in the country. Traditional and lay midwives, who provide basic pregnancy and birthing care and advice based primarily on experience and knowledge acquired informally through the traditions and practices of the communities where they originated, are classified here. Birth assistants, who provide emotional support and general care and advice to women and families during pregnancy and labour, are classified in Minor Group 532: Personal care workers in health services.

  • maternity support worker

Job titles from the EU's ESCO list. Search for any of them on the jobs page and you'll end up here.

80 / 100

Strongly holds up against AI

Most of this job still needs an actual human. AI would mostly be making the tea.

Not the odds you keep your job. It's how much of the everyday work still needs a person, out of 100.

← Robot's turf Human's turf →

The ILO's official verdict: Not Exposed

138 of 427 for holding up against AI

Why this score?

The ILO rated each of this job's 4 tasks for how much of it AI could do. They average 19.7 out of 100, so it holds up at 100 − 19.7 = 80.3.

That's the whole sum. No black box, no secret sauce: you can check it against the ILO's study. ILO group “Not Exposed”: None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count.

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Pinch of salt: this number is probably too rosy

It only asks what AI software could do, and this job is 56 out of 100 hands-on. A chatbot can't do that part. A robot might, one day, and nobody measures how close that is.

Man v Bot · compare

Who holds up better?

Midwifery associate professionals 80

v

Go on, try your partner's job. Or your sibling's. We won't tell.

Man v Bot

Where the bot helps, and where the human wins

Bot

What AI takes

The routine stuff. You may not miss it.

  • Health information and advice by app.
  • Digital maternity notes.
  • Appointment reminders.

Man

What people still do better

Judgement, trust and skilled hands. Hard to download.

  • Supporting women during birth.
  • Caring for mothers and newborns.
  • Recognising when something is wrong.

Both

What's arriving

New work that only exists because the AI does.

  • Remote monitoring in pregnancy.
  • Digital records shared with families.
  • More community-based care.

Written by a human, from the ILO's task ratings below. Yes, we see the irony. Read it as one person's take.

Meet your two rivals

They're not the same machine. AI software can only reach the parts of a job done on a screen or in words. A chatbot can't climb a ladder. A robot might, one day, if it doesn't fall off.

The AI

Lives in a screen. Never had to fix a boiler.

Threat level: Low

26 could do without you

It could take over very little of the work on its own. It could help with 63 of 100.

The robot

The wildcard. Has hands, still working out stairs.

How much it matters here: Some

56 how hands-on

A fair part of this job is hands-on, so robots would be needed for that part, not just software.

So could a robot do the physical part?

Physical work where helping and caring for people is a big part of the job. For care work, whether a machine could do the movements is only half the question. The other half is whether anyone wants one to. The US data counts helping workmates too, so a few trades end up here.

Robots hate fiddly work in awkward spaces. On that measure, this job scores 49 out of 100. The higher it is, the longer the robot waits.

56 How
hands-on
49 How fiddly
and cramped

Kind of hands-on work Hands-on, helping and caring for others

The small print

They aren't a robot score, and nothing on this page is. Nobody measures how far robots have got well enough to put a number on it. These are the closest thing we have: how hands-on the job is, and how much fiddly, cramped work it takes, which is what Frey and Osborne found hardest for machines.

From O*NET, averaged across 2 US jobs .

finger skill 50.9 · hand skill 44.6 · cramped spaces 52.1 · averaged · rule: hands-on 50+ · caring 4+ of 7

estimated O*NET 31.0 BLS occupational crosswalk chain ISCO-08 to 2010 SOC (Aug 2012, rev. Jun 2015); 2010 to 2018 SOC (Nov 2017); O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy data 0.8-observed-use measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

The job, task by task

Every job is really a bundle of tasks. Here's this one unpacked, with how much of each AI could do, out of 100. The score is the average, and averages can hide a lot.

AI's favourite task here scores 28, against an average of 20. The bigger the gap, the more lopsided the job: some of it wide open to AI, some of it barely touched.

  1. 28

    Providing advice to women, families and communities on health, nutrition, hygiene, exercise, birth and emergency plans, breastfeeding, infant care, family planning and contraception, lifestyle and other topics related to pregnancy and childbirth

    Low
  2. 22

    Assessing progress during pregnancy and childbirth, and recognizing signs and symptoms requiring referral to a health professional

    Very Low
  3. 18

    Providing care and support to women and newborns following childbirth, monitoring their health status, and identifying signs and symptoms requiring referral to a health professional.

    Very Low
  4. 11

    Providing delivery care, usually only in the absence of identified potential complications, or assisting medical doctors or midwifery professionals with delivery care

    Very Low

4 tasks · the High to Very Low labels are the ILO's

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.8-observed-use

Sidekick or replacement?

A tool that makes you faster is a very different thing from one that does the task while you watch. Jobs and Skills Australia measured the two separately, which is handy.

AI helps you
63
AI does it for you
26

Sidekick wins, by 37 points.

How good a match is this?

One Australian job matches this one closely, so this is about as reliable as it gets here.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.8-observed-use matched to Australian jobs 4114

Meanwhile, in real life…

Everything else here is about what AI could do. This is what people actually did. When they asked Claude for help with this kind of work, did they hand the whole task over, or roll their sleeves up and work through it together?

Tiny sample alert This job makes up 0.05% of all the conversations: a tiny slice, mostly the paperwork rather than the work. People using AI for a job isn't the same as AI being able to do it.

Out of every 100 conversations

66
34

worked through it together handed it over

The small print

Anthropic publishes this about its own product, and it doesn't feed into any score here. These are people who use Claude, not workers in general, so little use here doesn't mean AI can't reach the job.

These two add up to 100. The bars elsewhere on the page don't, because each is scored on its own, so we don't put them side by side.

observed use Anthropic Economic Index release 2026-06-26, period beginning 2026-05-01 data 0.8-observed-use 2026-05-01 · Anthropic, about its own product

So, should maternity support workers be worried?

Short answer: not really. Put the kettle on.

No. The most exposed task is advising families on health and birth plans, rated Low; assessing progress and caring for mothers and babies rate Very Low. Apps and digital notes help, but birth and postnatal care are hands-on.

Worth remembering: we score tasks, not jobs. When AI takes on a task, the job usually reshuffles around it rather than vanishing.

Where this job could lead

None of the new jobs we've written up start from here yet. Could be you're the first. See the jobs AI is creating →

How are the neighbours doing?

There are 82 jobs in the “Technicians and associate professionals” family, averaging 65. This one is above the family average.

Pit this against any other job →