The moat register

What a moat is

Underneath the exposure number, most career cards carry a second plate: the moat. It answers a different question from exposure. Exposure measures how much of the work AI already touches. The moat records what, structurally, still requires a person, regardless of how high or low that exposure score is.

A moat is not a vibe or a hunch. It is one of four defined categories, and a career only gets a plate once that category has actually been reviewed.

The four categories

PHYSICAL MOAT: the work is hands on, in the real world. Software alone cannot do it.

REGULATORY MOAT: the law requires human oversight. That human could be you.

RELATIONAL MOAT: people want a real person for this. That preference is the protection.

NO MOAT: no physical, legal or personal barrier protects this work from software. This is a real finding, not a placeholder. It means the category has been reviewed and none of the other three applied.

MOAT NOT YET CLASSIFIED is not a fifth category

A number of careers on Careermash carry a real, measured exposure score but have not yet had their moat reviewed. Those cards say MOAT NOT YET CLASSIFIED, in a distinct grey outline rather than any of the four colours above.

That wording exists because of a correction, recorded permanently in the site's public ledger: an earlier version of the site defaulted an unreviewed career to NO MOAT, which is a confident claim the review had never actually made. The fix was not to hide the exposure score, which was always real. It was to stop the moat plate asserting something nobody had checked.

How the register grows

The register starts from a core set of careers with a full, evidence reviewed record: a named occupational code, an archetype and a moat category, checked one by one. It has since been extended, career by career, using the same four categories, so more cards carry a real plate over time.

New entries only ever enter the register through a reviewed batch. Nothing is classified by default, and every batch that lands is dated in the site's public ledger.

One structural rule worth knowing: a moat also caps how high a career's exposure score can display. A hands on physical job cannot read above the low band, an in person relational job cannot exceed the moderate band, and a regulated job cannot exceed the high band, whatever the raw measurement said. It only ever lowers an over stated score, never raises one.

Where to see the whole picture

State of the Professions is the live report: how many careers sit in each moat category, how many are still unclassified, and the most and least exposed work across the whole measured set, computed fresh from the same data every card uses.