To help meet the demands of new fabs being built in the United States, apprenticeships are emerging as a key strategy for scaling up the talent pipeline.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), for example, sees apprenticeships as critical to supporting its workforce needs as it looks to staff two big fabs. In a recent panel discussion organized by the National Institute for Innovation and Technology (NIIT), Greg Jackson, director of facility operations of TSMC Arizona in Phoenix, said the company needs 4,500 direct hire TSMC employees who range from technicians to engineers to managers.

“There are a couple ways to get those kinds of people,” Jackson said. “You can hire experienced people, which is a finite pool, or you can develop people. That’s the goal here.” He added that apprenticeships put them on a pathway to a high paying job in an advanced technology facility.

Developing people—giving them the skills and the on-the-job experience they’ll need to secure a permanent post—takes time, Jackson noted, especially because there are unique skills needed that aren’t immediately available. “We’ve got to train them.”

Four key knowledge areas targeted

TSMC’s recently announced apprenticeship program in the Phoenix area focuses on developing people for a facility technician role by providing 2,000 hours of on-the-job training in four key skills areas: water treatment, gas and chemicals, electrical, and mechanical. Courses are provided by TSMC’s technical-instruction partner, Maricopa Community Colleges.

Mentorship is critical to the process: Apprentices are paired with mentors for one-on-one guidance.

TSMC identified technicians as a focus area based on its hiring needs over the next few years. The company is working with the entities in Arizona that are responsible for workforce development in the state and its various municipalities, including the Workforce Arizona Council.

Jackson said TSMC partners, including the City of Phoenix and the Maricopa colleges, have paved the way for its apprenticeship programs, enabling the company to grow the chipmaking workforce.

When TSMC reached out to other chipmakers and its equipment suppliers, it found a lot of similarity between the base skills in which training is needed.

NXP Semiconductor has also been working with Maricopa since early last year. The company began looking at developing apprenticeship programs in mid-2022.

At the recent NIIT panel talk, Johnnie Cain, front end operations training program manager at NXP, said NIIT has helped the company map out the process for developing a semiconductor equipment technician apprenticeship, which encompasses multiple specialty areas.

Regional collaboration addresses delivery concerns

Cain said a key concern was the administration aspects of delivering an apprenticeship program. “We really want to focus on building products for our customers, so that administration is a concern.”

Having the City of Phoenix step up to be a group sponsor mitigates many of NXP’s concerns, he added.

Leah Palmer, executive director of the Arizona Advanced Manufacturing Institute at Maricopa, told the panel that the institute has been able to act as a navigation tool to help tap into the resources of the 10 accredited colleges comprising Maricopa, as well as raise awareness among potential students and apprenticeship program participants.

“Most of them truly don’t know even what manufacturing is or manufacturing does,” she said. “Messaging was really, really important.”

So was resourcing, Palmer said, and Maricopa recognized the dynamic semiconductor industry needed a different solution that included working across multiple colleges simultaneously.

Apprenticeships fall into NIIT’s broader responsibility of executing a national strategy to build the talent pipeline to support strategic industry sectors, NITT CEO Mike Russo told EE Times in an exclusive interview in advance of the panel. “We have the playbook and we’re deploying it around the country,” he said.

National strategy underway

NIIT is the only federally recognized entity contracted by the U.S. Department of Labor to establish and expand registered apprenticeships throughout the semiconductor and nanotechnology-related industry supply chain, Russo said. NIIT began its work in 2022 and is now active in 22 states. “We have 85 employer programs up and running.”

These programs encompass 50 community colleges and training providers—and what NIIT calls a national network of instruction providers for these programs, he said.

NIIT’s approach to semiconductor apprenticeships is to make them competency-based rather than an hours-based approach: People go into the Growing Apprenticeships in Nanotechnology and Semiconductors (GAINS) program based on what they know so that training can be targeted to fill gaps in the workforce. Partners in the GAINS program include TSMC, NXP and the City of Phoenix.

In November 2022, NIIT partnered with Applied Materials to establish a registered apprenticeship program through GAINS aimed specifically at strengthening the company’s technician and assembler workforce along with regional partners, including Austin Community College, the Texas Department of Labor, and Workforce Solutions of Texas.

Russo said degree programs aren’t producing the number of people the industry needs. Apprenticeships are, he added, a “learn and earn” opportunity and allow people to earn income in the industry sooner. “You’re building a broader pipeline.”

NITT’s apprenticeship portfolio was launched prior to the passage of the CHIPs Act. Russo said investments that help develop talent are needed regardless of any efforts to scale up onshore manufacturing and recent federal government initiatives. He said they should be valuable to a broad swath of the population because the skills learned should be transferable across industries.

Right now, there’s a big push on a semiconductor-specific strategy for education and training, but Russo doesn’t think that approach makes sense given the traditional ups and downs of the chip industry. “The semiconductor industry, relatively speaking, does not have that many jobs and it’s very cyclical in nature,” he said.

Arizona’s semiconductor apprenticeship efforts are just one example of the workforce investments being made in the wake of the CHIPs Act. Oregon dedicated $240 million to its existing semiconductor industry last year. The state has nearly 31,000 workers in the semiconductor industry, earning an average annual wage of $171,750 in 2022.

However, Oregon still has a workforce gap to fill if it wants to be a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, according to a recent report by ECONorthwest, which found that Oregon’s higher education institutions, community-based organizations and industry leaders must collaborate to train workers and reeducate existing ones.

By: DocMemory
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