What can you do with an industrial and manufacturing engineering degree?
Where industrial and manufacturing engineering graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 12,258 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Industrial and manufacturing engineering is a degree that leads into a mix of engineering, management and analysis roles. About 7 in 100 people with this bachelor's degree work as industrial engineers, the largest single group we score. Smaller groups follow: management analysts, project management specialists and software developers at about 3 in 100 each, and general and operations managers, mechanical engineers and industrial production managers at about 2 in 100 each.
The biggest groups we do not score are managers in other roles at about 9 in 100, other engineers at about 4 in 100, chief executives at about 3 in 100 and postsecondary teachers at about 2 in 100. This page covers about 53% of graduates and gives no overall verdict. The figures come from Census data on more than 12,000 people with this degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site.
The related degree mechanical engineering has many of the same destinations.
How exposed are industrial and manufacturing engineering jobs to AI?
The largest group, industrial engineers, rates At risk (90 out of 100 structural exposure): BLS says licensure is not required for entry-level industrial engineer positions, so no licensing wall holds the verdict up. Most of the next groups also rate At risk, including management analysts, project management specialists and software developers. The main exception is industrial production managers, who rate AI-resistant despite the paperwork.
About 47% of graduates work in roles we do not score, led by managers in other roles at about 9 in 100 and other engineers at about 4 in 100, so coverage is 53%, below our 60% bar. Among graduates in jobs we score, about 68% are in At risk jobs, 20% in AI-resistant jobs and 11% in Safe jobs, and the degree's exposure figure is 74 out of 100. These describe task exposure, not what has happened to graduates.
The degree as a whole is not judged.
These figures cover the 53% of industrial and manufacturing engineering graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 47% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Other Managers; Other Engineers; Chief Executives and Legislators). 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 industrial and manufacturing engineering graduates actually work
These 10 occupations account for 39% of industrial and manufacturing engineering graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to industrial and manufacturing 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 industrial and manufacturing engineering graduates
The Census Bureau working paper (September 2026) places industrial and manufacturing engineering in the ninth of its ten exposure groups. Its appendix table shows about 13,500 graduates from 2018 to 2022. Its change in employment rate from 2022 to 2024 was about 1. 9 points below the average major's, and its change in earnings was about 2% above average.
The paper says nearly all majors in the seventh exposure group or higher had negative employment changes, but its sharpest results are in the top tenth, dominated by software-related degrees, which does not include this field.
The Dallas Fed, the NBER paper and Employ America do not name it in the text we read. The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI, so the Census row is context, not proof that AI caused this field's result.
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 "Industrial And Manufacturing Engineering" (code 2412), 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.