The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act has sparked a factory-building boom—and a hiring headache.

Analysts expect U.S. semiconductor employment to grow 33% between 2023 and 2030, adding roughly 115K positions. At the status quo, about 67K of them could go unfilled, including 26K technician roles that require two years of postsecondary education or less. Colleges need to ramp up, but getting the education and training—and the timing—right is no easy task. 

Austin Community College has been at it for a decade, and Garrett Groves, the vice chancellor of strategic initiatives there, wants his peers to know there’s no plug-and-play solution. 

ACC has one of the most robust partnerships in the country with the semiconductor industry—and cities nationwide have been turning to the college as they look to quickly ramp up their own workforces. The college is readily sharing its curriculum, including through a new partnership with Merit America, but also believes that’s just a jumping off point for other places.

“We were worried that people were going to just take the curriculum and think they’d solved the problem,” Groves says.

The Big Idea: So the college has set out to make the case for what it’s calling a cross-regional action collaborative. ACC started by enlisting the Institute for Networked Communities to tell its full story, and the resulting case study was released last month. The study walks through how the college steadily became the go-to trainer for chipmakers such as Samsung, NXP, and Applied Materials, creating a stack of programs that span from high-school academies to technician training to an applied bachelor’s degree.

  • Across all those programs, ACC partnered with companies to train almost 2,900 people last year.
  • And companies are increasingly ponying up for tuition, covering $380K last year. In one case, that included flying an instructor to another state every month and covering the associated costs.

But the main thrust of the study isn’t just to illuminate what’s worked for ACC, but to also make clear how much regional peculiarities matter. Austin isn’t Phoenix, isn’t upstate New York, isn’t Columbus, Ohio. New York, for example, has a particular focus on lifting up traditionally disadvantaged communities with its investments. And both Columbus and Phoenix expect to need far more workers—10K technicians, alone, in Phoenix—than Austin does.

More than a single model, what’s needed the authors argue is a cross-regional action network that would bring together college, economic development, and industry leaders to speed up the learning cycle, problem solve, and jointly tackle deeper, strategic issues. Both the SEMI Foundation, a major industry association, and the National Semiconductor Technology Center, a public-private partnership spun out of the Department of Commerce, are potential homes for such an initiative. 

“Building an effective semiconductor workforce pipeline is a whole lot more complex than it might appear from the outside,” says Francie Genz, co-author and CEO of INC.

Universal Challenges: The focus is often on changing business-as-usual at colleges to make their programs more responsive to quickly-evolving industry needs, and that’s part of the equation, Genz says. But companies themselves also aren’t typically prepared to do the kinds of workforce and skill forecasting that is required.

“It’s easy to assume that companies know exactly what they need and that we just need to ask, but that’s often not the case,” she says. “Many firms are still figuring it out themselves, especially as roles evolve alongside technology and production models.”

Another misconception is that semiconductor jobs would be easy to fill, if only people had the right skills. “Semiconductor jobs are not automatically as good as many outside observers assume, or want to think,” says Ryan Donahue, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Metro and a report co-author.

Semiconductor fabrication plants, or fabs, are often sold to regions based on the idea that there are many jobs that don’t require degrees and that the average wages are high. Both are often true—but that doesn’t mean that the easily-accessible jobs are the ones that pay well, Donahue says. That’s especially true in places with tight labor markets, like Austin, where an Amazon warehouse worker might bring in as much as an entry-level fab operator making $35K a year.

The Long Haul: Workers will often need to progress up the ladder into more lucrative technician and engineering roles, and companies will have to be willing to pay for that, Donahue says.

That progression has been a major focus for ACC, and it works closely with companies to help them see the value of investment in regular upskilling, including relief time for employees. “What’s most important to us is how we’re able to help our students get not just their first job but their second or third job,” Groves says.

The college builds the case for continued investment, in part, by building up trust during times when they are spinning up solutions for companies’ immediate hiring needs. In other words, the work is both a sprint and a marathon.  

And ACC wants more boom regions to understand that.