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Craft and related trades workers · code 7535

Pelt dressers, tanners and fellmongers

Pelt dressers, tanners and fellmongers trim, scrape, clean, tan, buff and dye animal hides, pelts or skins to produce leather stock and finished furs for making garments and other products. Tasks include - (a) sorting and grading pelts, hides and skins according to colour, shading, size and density; (b) scraping particles of flesh, fat or protective tissue from skins or pelts to clean and soften them; (c) removing hair from skin or hides soaked in lime water; (d) preparing hides by curing them with salt; (e) removing long, coarse hair from pelts and trimming underlying hair to even length; (f) tanning and dressing pelts to improve lustre and beauty or to restore the natural appearance of pelts; (g) preparing bark and myrobalan liquor for treating hides or skins; (h) treating hides and skins in tanning solution to convert them into leather; (i) tinting or dyeing furs to enhance natural shades of fur; (j) removing wrinkles and setting grains on wet hides or skins; (k) dressing and applying dyes and stains to leather; (l) stretching and smoothing dressed pelts; (m) seasoning leather by applying chemical solution or oil evenly onto the surface by hand brush and allowing it to dry in open air. Examples of the occupations classified here: - Fellmonger - Pelt grader - Tanner Some related occupations classified elsewhere: - Tanning machine operator - 8155

None of this job's tasks scored high enough to count. It ranks 18 of 427 for holding up against AI.

Also known as

  • leather sorter

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

89
Holds up
against AI Not Exposed

AI could take on 11 of 100, on average
so it holds up at 100 − 11 = 89

That's the whole sum, and you can check it against the ILO's study.

60.1
How hands-on
out of 100

From O*NET, matched to one US job

30.6
How fiddly
and cramped

finger skill 39.3 · hand skill 44.6 · cramped spaces 8 · averaged

Kind of hands-on work · hands-on 50+ · fiddly under 39.4 Hands-on, less fiddly work

Less fine handwork and fewer cramped spaces than a typical hands-on job. That clears one hurdle for machines. It doesn't mean machines are doing this work yet.

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 0.7-work-setting measures chosen by Frey & Osborne (2017) · the grouping is a sorting, not a measurement

This number is probably too high

This score only looks at AI tools like chatbots. It doesn't look at robots at all — and this job rates 60.1 out of 100 for how hands-on it is, which is exactly where robots come in.

Have a look at the tasks below and judge for yourself. The ILO scored them low because a chatbot can't do them. Whether a machine with hands could is a different question, and we can't answer it yet.

The tasks behind the score

The score is the average of these. A job is really a bundle of tasks, and an average can hide how uneven that bundle is.

The task AI could do most of scores 15, while the average is 11. A big gap means some of this job is wide open to AI and some of it barely at all. That's quite different from a job where everything sits somewhere in the middle, even when the averages match.

  1. 15

    Sorting and grading pelts, hides and skins according to colour, shading, size and density

    Very Low
  2. 15

    Dressing and applying dyes and stains to leather

    Very Low
  3. 13.5

    Seasoning leather by applying chemical solution or oil evenly on surface by hand brush and allowing it to dry in open air.

    Very Low
  4. 13

    Tinting or dyeing furs to enhance natural shades of fur

    Very Low
  5. 12.5

    Preparing bark and myrobalan liquor for treating hides or skins

    Very Low
  6. 11.8

    Removing wrinkles and setting grains on wet hide or skin

    Very Low
  7. 11.3

    Treating hides and skins in tanning solution to convert them into leather

    Very Low
  8. 10

    Tanning and dressing pelts to improve lustre and beauty or restore natural appearance of pelts

    Very Low
  9. 10

    Stretching and smoothing dressed pelts

    Very Low
  10. 9.8

    Preparing hides by curing them with salt

    Very Low
  11. 7.3

    Removing hair from skin or hides soaked in lime water

    Very Low
  12. 6.8

    Scraping particles of flesh, fat or protective tissue from skins or pelts to clean and soften them

    Very Low
  13. 6.8

    Removing long, coarse hair from pelts and trimming underlying hair to even length

    Very Low

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

from the source Working Paper 140, Generative AI and Jobs 2025 index data 0.7-work-setting

Helped, or replaced?

The score above can't tell a tool that makes you faster from one that does the task instead of you. Jobs and Skills Australia looked at those two things separately, and this is their result, matched to this job.

3 Australian jobs match this one, and we've simply averaged them. Treat the numbers as a rough guide.

AI helps you
54.7
AI does it for you
27

Helping wins by 27.7 points.

estimated Our Gen AI Transition (Gen AI Capacity Study) September 2025 detailed data release data 0.7-work-setting matched to Australian jobs 3999, 7117, 8399

Compared with similar jobs

There are 65 jobs in the “Craft and related trades workers” group, averaging 83.4. This one is above that.