So for instance refer to this data.

004,Hendrix,James,Engineering,9
237,Cauthon,Mat,Marketing,2
889,Wallace,Mia,Accounting,8
096,Uffhark,Joan,Administration,9
120,Carrington,Blake,Accounting,8
053,Draper,Don,Marketing,3
413,Zappa,Francesco,Engineering,9
285,Gunvalson,Victoria,Engineering,9
744,Watts,Charles,Administration,8
409,Wilson,Brian,Engineering,9
346,McCormick,Kenneth,Marketing,2
070,Berlin,Rachel,Marketing,2
555,Zombie,Robert,Administration,7
217,Burns,Fahr,Accounting,8
154,Tennille,Antoinette,Engineering,9
843,Trakand,Elayne,Administration,8
654,Grumby,Jonas,Administration,7
026,Corleone,Michael,Marketing,3
599,March,Christopher,Engineering,9
808,Mann,Yoda,Engineering,9

Now how would i make a list of data showing only the department and the total number of employees it has. For instance how would I would a Linux command to show the Engineering department and how many people work in that department based off the data? What i am concluding is using the "awk" command but im not for sure. someone please help.

What have you done/tried so far?? And read the "Question Guidelines" and LQ Rules, please...we're happy to help you, but posting a homework question without showing your own efforts isn't going to get you much.

Awk is complex and can do quite a bit. You can also accomplish this with a bash script, using grep and other things as well. Perl, python, and any other scripting/programming language can also be used. You also don't tell us what your data above actually is, or where it comes from.

Why not grep for the various departments?

I have tried awk to cut out specific fields in the directory and list only the fields I wants for instance awk -F "," '{print $4}' labdata | grep Engineering | wc -l. But when i do that it only list the number of times it shows up for instance "7" is what pops up I dont know how to get the word Engineering into the command line with it.

You can count each department in an string-addressed array (hash).
At the END print each department with its count.
The for loop lets i cycle through each (string-)index of cnt[]

That counts the number of instances of each department in the list, not the total employes, but is certainly an excellent starting point for the OP to resolve the issue.