By James Anderson, Business Development Manager at Actalent
With companies investing more than half a trillion dollars in shoring up the American semiconductor ecosystem, the U.S. is on track to triple chip manufacturing capacity from 2022 to 2032—the highest growth rate of any country in the world, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
The only problem is whether we can develop, recruit and retain the skilled workforce needed to power this chip revolution.
It’s a question impacting nearly every city and town, from Oregon to upstate New York, where the rebirth of U.S. semiconductor manufacturing is underway. According to a report from SIA, upwards of 70,000 jobs—about 58% of the approximately 115,000 jobs the industry will add by 2030—will go unfilled. This includes 13,400 computer scientists, 27,300 engineers and 26,400 technicians all “missing” from the U.S. workforce.
Those are just the shortfalls of skilled workers needed to meet anticipated chip demand. If the goal were for the U.S. to become a fully self-sufficient chip producer, the gap would be more than four times greater.
Closing the semiconductor talent gap, however, won’t be a matter of just filling a pipeline; it will require re-thinking, re-building and re-routing it. Here’s how.
Tracing the Origins of the Talent Gap
Why are so many skilled workers missing?
For one, over the last 25 years, the U.S. semiconductor industry concentrated almost exclusively on chip design—and chip manufacturing dwindled in response. America went from making 37% of the world’s semiconductors in the 1990s to less than 10% in 2024. None of the world’s most advanced chips are made in the U.S. either, even though many are designed here.
Naturally, America’s semiconductor talent pipeline followed suit. Why study for a career in chip manufacturing when the job opportunities were increasingly slim?
This came at a cost. The decline in domestic manufacturing led to the degradation and disappearance of institutional semiconductor manufacturing knowledge—the kind of foundational experience gained by working in a fab every day over a long period of time.
But the design-focused strategy allowed U.S. chip companies to own more than 50% of the global semiconductor market since the late 1990s, with South Korea in at distant second place with 13.8%. From that perspective, the ends had seemingly justified the means.
Until the global chip shortage hit.
The COVID-induced shortage from 2020 to 2023 laid bare a hard reality: As a nation inextricably tied to chip innovation, sales and consumption, the U.S. was proportionally among the most vulnerable end-users in the semiconductor supply chain.
The vulnerability was such that bipartisan U.S. lawmakers came together and concluded that America could no longer afford to just design the most advanced chips; it had to start making and packaging them onshore. Hence the $52.7 billion CHIPS Act, plus the half trillion in private semiconductor investment, came into being.
Announcement after announcement of projects supporting all things chips have followed: R&D, design, microelectronics manufacturing, advanced packaging, metrology, material handling and supply chain, and the list goes on. The timing of this push has also coincided with momentous advancements in AI, which will require rapid chip development to satisfy ever-increasing technological and energy demands.
Essentially, there are detailed plans to quickly develop every aspect of U.S. semiconductor production except for one: talent.
The Cost and Conundrum of Missing Chip Talent
To see both a preview and a microcosm of the U.S. semiconductor talent situation, look no further than delayed progress and production at TSMC’s foundries in Arizona. The company ultimately had to bring in its own engineers and technicians from its headquarters in Taiwan to offset a shortage of skilled American foundry workers, suffering expensive delays in the process.
Faced with the same challenge, what will other companies do?
Developing the talent pipeline from colleges, universities, technical schools and training programs will obviously be critical. However, it could take years for curriculums, enrollments and salaries to hit stride with demand.
Looking for talent outside of the U.S. will also continue to be a key strategy. However, unless immigration laws are streamlined to efficiently import skilled talent, this avenue may create more challenges than it alleviates.
Yet even if an abundance of newly graduated mechanical, electrical, material and manufacturing engineering and technical talent hit the labor market overnight, there’s still the complicating fact that developing semiconductor human capital often requires extensive on-the-job training.
Therein lies the U.S. semiconductor conundrum: companies can’t start making advanced chips without advanced chip-making talent. However, they won’t have advanced chip-making talent until they start making advanced chips. Which comes first?
Short of bringing in talent from elsewhere or taking decades to build a steady pipeline of educated and fully trained talent, how can semiconductor companies overcome skilled worker shortages right now?
In the near term, companies looking to hire skilled workers should establish specialized recruiting efforts that scour individual labor markets city-by-city, state-by-state and region-by-region for qualified candidates that have the bulk of the necessary skills and hire them, to get ahead of future needs. They can also work with outsourcing services and workforce solutions companies to fill immediate gaps.
But the problem of building a robust talent pipeline remains.
Building Tomorrow’s Chip Talent Pipeline Today
Fixing the talent shortage is beyond the control of any one company. It will require a multi-faceted approach and collaboration across the industry.
To build an engineering and computer science talent pipeline, semiconductor companies should work with college programs or engage in on-campus recruiting efforts to educate students about the benefits of a career in the semiconductor industry to overcome a pervasive lack of awareness. But this is more than a branding problem: the industry also needs to offer data-driven salary and benefits packages that compete with software companies attracting engineering talent.
On the technician side, implementing intensive onboarding, training and upskilling programs, such as TSMC’s technician apprenticeship program, can help manufacturers develop the talent they need. Over a longer period, developing partnerships with secondary and higher education institutions to promote and develop talent at local levels, particularly among underrepresented groups like people of color and veterans, can also help expand the pool of U.S.-based technicians.
At a policy level, companies should also be collaborating with local, state and federal agencies to ensure funding, laws, services and infrastructure are aligned with strengthening a skilled workforce.
Addressing the shortage of skilled semiconductor talent will take perseverance, cooperation and considerable industry investment. However, if chip companies want to meet their U.S. production goals, they need to begin building talent pipelines now. The future of the American semiconductor ecosystem depends on it.
