What can you do with a chemical engineering degree?
Where chemical engineering graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 18,862 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Chemical engineering is a degree where most graduates do not work as chemical engineers. About 8.7 in 100 people with a chemical engineering bachelor's degree work as chemical engineers. Another 4.4 in 100 are industrial engineers and 3.3 in 100 are software developers. About 2 in 100 each work as management analysts, project management specialists and civil engineers, and about 1.6 in 100 are physicians.
The largest groups we do not score are managers in other roles, about 7 in 100, and other engineers, about 6. 5 in 100. Physical scientists not classified elsewhere and postsecondary teachers are about 3 in 100 each, chief executives and legislators about 2. 4 in 100, and materials engineers about 1 in 100. This page covers about 55% of chemical engineering graduates.
The figures come from Census data on 18,862 people with a chemical engineering degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site. Compare chemistry and mechanical engineering for neighbouring degrees.
How exposed are chemical engineering jobs to AI?
We do not give chemical engineering one overall verdict. The largest group, chemical engineers, is rated At risk with medium confidence: the job's structural exposure is high (78 out of 100) and no individual licensing wall holds it up, since BLS says licensure is not required for entry-level chemical engineers. But only about 9 in 100 graduates work in that job.
Industrial engineers and software developers are also rated At risk, while physicians and industrial production managers are AI-resistant despite the paperwork. Of the graduates we can score, about 67 in 100 work in At risk jobs, 25 in 100 in AI-resistant jobs and 8 in 100 in Safe jobs. That is just under our 70% bar for an At risk label, and coverage is 55%, below our 60% bar.
These figures cover the 55% of chemical engineering graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 45% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Other Managers; Other Engineers; Physical Scientists, all Other). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where chemical engineering graduates actually work
These 10 occupations account for 43% of chemical engineering graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to chemical engineering, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and chemical engineering graduates
Chemical engineering falls in the ninth of ten exposure groups in the Census Bureau working paper (September 2026, appendix Table A3), below the software-heavy top group. For this field the paper reports no change in employment relative to the average major between 2022 and 2024 (0. 000) and earnings about 4% above it, based on about 18,500 graduates from 2018 to 2022.
Employ America (July 2025, using New York Fed data through 2023) named chemistry, not chemical engineering, among fields with higher unemployment, and noted that four of the ten majors with the biggest falls in unemployment were in engineering. The Dallas Fed and NBER pages do not report results for this degree by name. The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI, and our verdict scores the jobs, not these outcomes.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
Degrees whose graduates work in similar jobs
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Chemical Engineering" (code 2405), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. The survey records the most recent occupation of people who were not working when surveyed (unemployed or out of the labor force), and they are counted in it: across the degrees on this site that is about 9 in 100 graduates, between 6 and 13 in 100 depending on the degree, so "work as" on this page means "work or last worked as". Sources: www2.census.gov, www2.census.gov, www.dallasfed.org, www.nber.org, employamerica.org, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.