Nuclear Engineering:

Where the Grads Go

I have discovered that LinkedIn maintains statistics, by field, of where LinkedIn members in different fields work, what they do (ex., engineering, research, operations), and where they went to school.  The fields they have analyzed include nuclear engineering.  That alone makes this survey somewhat special, and nuclear engineering is a fairly small field and I have seen many studies that do not identify nuclear engineers as a separate category.

Their statistics represent over 23,000 nuclear engineers.  The complete table shows the top 25 places of employment, schools, and areas of work (by numbers in each category).  I will not reproduce the entire table here, but thought it would be fun to share the top 5 in each category:

     Schools:              Penn State, MIT, UMichigan, Texas A&M, RPI

     Employers:         USNavy, Westinghouse, Duke, Exelon, NRC

     Areas of Work:   Engineering, Research, Operations, Education, Program/Project
                                  Management

Interested readers can find the top 25 responses in each category at the link above. 

I have not tried to analyze how these statistics compare to the numbers reported in any other sources of such data, but with more than 23,000 nuclear engineers in their database, I suspect that these numbers represent a pretty fair cross section of the industry.  I do recognize that this is a somewhat superficial survey, and it is unclear whether "nuclear engineer" is defined in any consistent way--whether by degree, nature of work, or self-reporting.

Therefore, the numbers need to be used with a bit of caution.  Nevertheless, the table is a helpful way to get a broad overview of of the distribution of nuclear engineers today.  And it may be of interest to some to see where their alma maters and employers fall on this list.

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