42,246 courses · 2,524 curriculum guides Sponsored by eAgentic Software Sponsored by eAgentic Software

14.07Chemical Engineering

Career paths in this area

Chemical Engineer SOC 17-2041
Chemical engineers design and run the processes that turn raw materials into products at scale — reactors, separations, heat and mass transfer, and the control and safety systems around them. It is the engineering discipline built on chemistry, and the only one that requires organic chemistry. ⚠⚠ In Florida it is taught at just FOUR institutions in THREE cities, and neither UCF nor FIU awards the degree — which makes where you start your degree the most consequential decision on this page.
Chemist and Chemical Technician SOC 19-2031
⚠⚠⚠ The question this page answers is whether you need a doctorate, and the data is unusually clear: 30% of working chemists report one as required — the highest doctoral share of any occupation on this site — while 56% report a bachelor's. They are two different careers and the choice has to be made in the second undergraduate year. ⚠⚠ Also here: the chemical TECHNICIAN route has 7,600 annual openings on an associate degree, more than chemists and materials scientists combined.
⚠ Chemical Engineering — named because students confuse the two and the difference is structural: a chemist studies what substances do, an engineer designs the plant that makes them. ⚠⚠ Engineering reaches its ceiling through the PE licence; chemistry reaches its ceiling through the doctorate.

Careers without a path yet

The U.S. Department of Education links these careers to this field of study, but nobody has written a career path for them on this site yet. Press Request to ask for one. Paths are written in order of demand, and you can follow each request in the career request queue. Requests are anonymous: your browser keeps a random ID so that pressing Request again the same day counts once. We store no name or email, and your network address is kept only in scrambled form, to stop abuse. The SOC number is the U.S. Department of Labor’s code for the occupation.

Also covered by a career path filed under another field: