After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree, McKee toured with the APA (Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, appearing on Broadway alongside Helen Hayes, Rosemary Harris and Will Geer.

In 1983, as Fulbright Scholar, McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California (USC), where he began offering his STORY Seminar class.

Since 1984, more than 50,000 students have taken McKee's course in cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto, Boston, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Auckland, Singapore, Barcelona, Stockholm, São Paulo and more[citation needed].

In addition, several companies such as ABC, Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount regularly send their creative and writing staffs to his lectures.

[citation needed] Notable writers and actors such as Geoffrey Rush, Paul Haggis, Akiva Goldsman, William Goldman, Joan Rivers, David Bowie, Kirk Douglas, John Cleese, Tony Kaye, and Steven Pressfield, have taken his seminar.

In 2017, McKee was inducted into the Hall of Fame at the Final Draft Awards, an honor that recognizes professionals who have had a "profound influence on the industry"[6] joining peers such as Lawrence Kasdan and Steven Zaillian.

McKee's other credits include writing and presenting the BBC series Filmworks, the Channel 4 series Reel Secrets, the BAFTA Award-winning J'accuse Citizen Kane television program which he wrote and presented, and the writing of Abraham, the four-hour mini-series on Turner Network Television (TNT) that starred Richard Harris, Barbara Hershey and Maximilian Schell.

[7][8] McKee has responded to such criticisms, noting that "the world is full of people who teach things they themselves cannot do" while admitting that even though he has sold all of his screenplays, he still lacks screen credits for them since they were never produced by the studios that bought them, only optioned.