This is the final edition in a series of briefs unpacking key findings from field research probing the impact of multibillion-dollar public and private semiconductor investments on four regional workforce development systems. The briefs also offer a broad set of recommendations about how these innovations and collaborations might be replicable in workforce systems across the U.S.
Overview
The surge of new public and private investments in the semiconductor sector spurred a wide range of innovations and new practices in regional workforce development in the high-tech metropolitan areas of Phoenix and Austin, as well as the post-industrial regions of central Ohio and upstate New York. Growing out of experiences with the chips investments, these regions are leading the way in forging new approaches to workforce training models for moving workforce systems and institutions toward a “new normal” set of operations.
As critical domestic semiconductor production continues to ramp up, alongside expansion of other advanced manufacturing sectors, new workforce training programs and practices are evolving apace. This field research found that innovations and collaborations among key workforce development players are attracting and training new workers. However, those efforts will need to continue to iterate so that they don’t merely paper over larger systemic workforce problems and neglect systems-wide weaknesses and gaps.
Nevertheless, the high concentration of new semiconductor sector funds (and their impacts on workforce systems) represents a unique opportunity for workforce leaders in other regions to rethink their training systems and operations. Today, many of these systems are fractured across separate institutional structures, such as our community colleges and K-12 educational institutions, workforce development boards and advanced manufacturing associations, and public and nonprofit economic development organizations. But these new investments are demonstrating not only how these systems can relate differently to each other but also lead to important new operational practices and collaborations.
These lessons may have relevance even in regions not experiencing high levels of sector-specific investment, but where leaders are seeking new ways of doing business that promote more efficient and effective training pipelines.Building on these new practices can contribute to our nation’s current and future productivity, competitiveness, and security.
So how can policymakers and players in regional workforce development scale and sustain these innovative approaches that reskill and train new workers and supply more talent to businesses that are hungry for talent? Despite hurdles, the fundamental ingredients now exist. New cross-industrial-sector collaborations, multilevel coordination efforts within and across the workforce and economic development systems, and institutional expansions are moving workforce systems and institutions to a new way of doing business.
Yet continuing innovations and interventions are critical to rewrite a workforce training system playbook that leads to greater productivity—expanding the advanced manufacturing talent pipeline, experimenting with new programs, and generating multiple pathways to jobs. This last issue brief in our series on the impact of new chips funds on regional workforce systems presents five lessons in shifting to a “new normal.” (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1
Design training programs for future jobs and career pathways, not solely for immediate job placement
Local leaders in four regions benefiting from the chips investments in workforce training are designing training programs that provide workers with career-building and portable skills in mind—in addition to new programs training workers directly for in-demand, current technician jobs. Regional workforce officials recognized the downside for workers of the tradeoffs made in past industrial growth spurts, when workers were often trained with short-term skills for specific, in-demand jobs but ultimately lacked portable credentials, thus compromising their ability to pursue other jobs and career ladders.
For instance, community college officials now emphasize taking advantage of these chips investments to restructure their training programs by embedding stackable noncredit tracks, such as the so-called Fast-Track programs now up and running in New York and Arizona. They are also including for-credit certificates that workers can use to fill immediate technician jobs in the semiconductor industry while also building career pathways beyond those technician jobs. These new training models prepare workers for an array of advanced manufacturing jobs that are performance-based and buttressed by competency-based testing and generated in partnership with chip companies, industry organizations, and public and nonprofit sector economic development and workforce organizations.
However, these new approaches also require new metrics that prize measuring long-term career-building rather than reflecting institutional biases focused only on immediate job placement. A forward-looking senior community college official expressed concern about the need to avoid “getting caught up” in the “semiconductor moment.” The official pointed to flaws in short-term certifications and concerns about ensuring these technician jobs are really stepping stones to career ladders.
Fortunately, tight labor market conditions have driven new semiconductor and other advanced industry collaborations that share career-building training objectives. And, despite recent changes in the labor market, industry leaders are still motivated to forge new partnerships that lead to creating “better” jobs, with more upskilling pathways at better wages. Educators also are seeking to leverage the new semiconductor sector opportunities to expand their own programs.
Yet the strategies for elevating workers’ needs and aligning workforce system functionality with corporate goals can differ dramatically from region to region. For instance, upstate New York has embedded workforce training in its business development model and centered it around community building and economic development. By contrast, other regions are more recently coming to understand the importance of workforce-training in paying dividends for businesses and workers alike.
Standardized training approaches can incorporate both short-term skills for in-demand jobs while also providing skills beneficial for longer-term career pathways (such as the essential “soft” people and management skills). For instance, on-ramp training programs, customized for the semiconductor industry, are emerging alongside community college credit programs, industry apprenticeships and “earn and learn” programs, and dual enrollment programs between high schools and colleges that embed wider skills-building. Likewise, while this can be challenging, workforce system metrics that are set to measure a region’s move toward career-pathways training can spur change and ensure systems continue to evolve, beyond providing the immediate supply of trained workers, and offer a model for other regions in the country.
Create multiple training on-ramps rather than single points of entry
Another chief takeaway from the four regions’ experiences is that multiplying the access pathways to workforce training systems expands the talent pool for new semiconductor positions and other advanced manufacturing jobs. Workforce systems that increase entry points for the pipeline, by offering a variety of training program types and locations, expand access to a broader talent pool.
Leaders from across the regions uniformly confirmed the critical need is not to have just one stellar or “gold standard” training program, as one Texas official termed it. The idea is to offer programs that cater to the needs of different populations and serve as entry points for new workers, generating a “highway with lots of on-ramps,” as one community college official said, and reaching new populations and providing broad access to these jobs. Multiplying on-ramps for a variety of populations embraces the dual approach of strategically preparing workers for short-term, in-demand jobs as well as for longer-term career pathways. It also acknowledges that the starting points may differ from population to population and need to be tailored.
Finding and training workers from populations underrepresented in the chips sector, including women, veterans, and people of color, is essential in order for businesses to meet production goals across the entire semiconductor sector—not just the fabs but also their many suppliers. Multiple on-ramps for workers not only help meet the production needs of the broader advanced manufacturing sectors, but also provide a springboard for shaping workers’ future economic opportunity and mobility via technician jobs in advanced industries writ large. These multiple entry points broaden opportunities for workers—who are unlikely to hold or later earn four-year college degrees—to gain access to a pathway to future jobs that may go beyond their first semiconductor sector job, increase potential for greater quality-of-life, and serve broader goals of building an equitable society.
Increased accessibility through multiple training pathways is inherently dependent on the stability and capacity of component trainers, such as community colleges, other workforce institutions, and the K-12 education system, and on the success of their program implementation. A diverse set of training programs and pathways is not duplicative but essential for each region to successfully increase the talent pipeline. These are lessons that other regions can learn from and replicate.
Collaborate to recruit and train workers cross-jurisdictionally
As the first two issue briefs in this series highlighted, new and different collaborations are occurring among companies across multiple political jurisdictions comprising regional labor sheds. These cross-jurisdictional collaborations are accounting for regions’ unique histories and assets but are uniformly catalyzed by the new chips funding to meet employment needs of the future.
For instance, the Greater Phoenix region’s centralized career and technical education facilities serve multiple school districts, training high schoolers in Maricopa County and building on more than a decade of semiconductor companies operating in the region. This supply-side system is being adopted and recently expanded to meet the increased volume of needed chip technicians and other advanced manufacturing workers.
On the demand side, intermediaries and cross-jurisdictional organizations in Austin and Phoenix are assembling and convening “tables” of semiconductor and advanced manufacturing business leaders across their regions. These tables collaboratively sort through systems-training challenges, surface common mutual areas of benefit and concerns, and experiment with new training models that could provide valuable lessons for other regions. For instance, the Austin Regional Manufacturing Association and Austin Community College convened the so-called “Fab 5” (the five major semiconductor companies in its region), launching a collaborative approach to technician training.
Historically, education and training reforms have been viewed as a supply issue. But this breakthrough strategy in Austin and Phoenix adopted an explicit demand side approach, asking the companies what they need, and designing training for a specific skillset to fill employers’ needs. This strategic realignment in training—beneficial for both companies and the workers—is essential, particularly with the scale of new industry entrants in these markets. It also offers new regional economic growth models.
There is a yearning for greater regional coordination among leaders in different regions, exemplified by calls for a single coordinating entity to take on more coordinating functions that serve companies and workers in a regional labor shed. One leader characterized the vision for this role as being about “waking up every day” thinking about the new Intel, Micron, Samsung, and TSMC opportunities across companies, suppliers, and regions.
Such a regional leader could steward programs across different educational and workforce training systems, rooting out and breaking down barriers and systemic challenges that interfere with amplifying the talent pipeline. This kind of regional leadership also could help navigate collaborations across multiple government levels.
While it is unrealistic in most places for a single entity to take on all these functions, calls for the concept of a regional workforce steward or single point of contact illustrate the vacuum that a backbone economic development organization, workforce intermediary and other entity can fill, as well as the need for more intentional and deliberate steps toward cross-regional collaboration. A combination of these steps is likely to augment and drive greater workforce training synergies, worker and industry productivity and efficiencies, and draw new talent from a larger population, enhancing worker mobility. Regional workforce stewards could provide valuable examples for other regions seeking to replicate new cross-regional models.
Strengthen institutional networks to boost systems connectivity and align with corporate job hiring
The four regions are demonstrating new collaborative and creative problem-solving practices. The unusual circumstances in the chips industry today have incentivized corporate collaborations and connections with regional training networks that are nimble across career pathways and industry sectors. Industry cooperation also has led to the establishment of regionwide, centralized training models, which supplement educational institutions with corporate faculty and other benefits that demonstrate greater corporate and workforce systems alignment. These efforts ultimately increase their regions’ overall competitive advantages.
For instance, the common time lag between job training for workers and their placement in new semiconductor fabs has incentivized local industry sectors to come together to leverage the gap and plan collectively and strategically for how to train workers now and for the future. This delay can last between two and five years or longer, depending on whether new fabs are being built in greenfields or are extensions of existing production facilities, and whether recent business decisions result in build-out and production delays, such as Intel is now experiencing.
On a practical level, if training starts too early, then workers are promised jobs that have not yet come online. But if training starts too late, then jobs may not be filled in a timely manner. These approaches differ from region to region. For instance, as fabs’ expansions take place in Arizona and Texas, the interim training programs are aligning to supply workers to employment opportunities at existing chips facilities, their suppliers, and other advanced manufacturing companies that require skillsets similar to the chips factory technician jobs. And in central Ohio and upstate New York, where new fabs are being constructed on “greenfield” sites and thus are on a longer timeline, trained workers can be deployed in other industry sectors, such as auto manufacturing or other advanced industries.
Whatever the gap, local businesses are realizing the benefits of collaborating to train workers for technician-related jobs across advanced manufacturing sectors, as the chips fabs are being finished—underscoring the advantages and pressing need for increased industry and workforce system collaboration. Greater industry collaboration and involvement ensure the system does not buckle under the pressures of expediting worker training and supply.
Similarly, regionwide collaborative solutions, such as New York’s Board of Cooperative Education Services system and Maricopa County’s career and technical education centers in Arizona, are providing solutions that address transitions from high school to post-secondary level classes through centralized training. These centralized models may be replicable but will need to be iterated on to ensure they are not just ad hoc solutions, but rather are developed and implemented uniformly.
More and increasingly intensive interventions could focus on these transition points to ensure young adults understand all their options as they move out of high school. Regions would benefit from sharing “continuum-of-training” approaches and dual enrollment community college programs that integrate systems connections. In all regions, additional outreach and new plans to amplify the workforce pipelines should start now, with pilot programs testing new curricula to evaluate how it is working for students and for the companies.
Finally, closer networking among training providers can set regions on a new, more competitive trajectory while also benefiting corporate productivity. But greater corporate involvement can also overcome significant disconnects that exist between industry and the workforce ecosystems. Companies routinely have arms-length relationships with workforce development systems. This results in their lack of understanding about the systems, while inadvertently undermining steps that regions are taking to recruit and train workers. It also can lead companies to fail to invest in external training programs to skill or reskill existing workers.
However, companies in these four regions now are incentivized to be a more integral part of the training network, to enhance their own productivity and the region’s potential as a more dynamic system. For instance, corporations are a central resource for supplying trained faculty from their own employee ranks to community colleges. Corporations also are getting involved in helping workforce systems provide the extensive supports, such as child care and transportation services, necessary to attract, train, and retain new workers from racially and economically diverse backgrounds.
This increased collaboration and alignment occurring across multiple players in workforce development and business development organizations and their corporate members may be a model for other regions. An unusual moment may exist to experiment with recalibrating industry and workforce relationships at the regional levels, even as the national policy landscape is changing.
Forge industry-wide training strategies instead of employer-specific training approaches
Increased connectivity on the industry side, particularly with economic development organizations acting as backbone organizations that convene advanced manufacturing companies more regularly, is complementary to increased workforce systems connectivity. But barriers and disconnects still exist within the business sector.
First, corporations are not always forthcoming or transparent about specific skills and training competencies needed for their workers, despite contributions they make to the conceptual design of industry-wide training programs. This lack of corporate transparency or openness has led to delays in colleges’ ability to translate training needs into curricula designs and, in turn, to gaps in developing and rolling out new training programs that meet companies’ needs. This corporate reluctance stems from confidentiality concerns around their operations and training needs or occupations, which could expose new product development on shop floors. And uncertainty about timing, amounts, and follow-through on federal subsidies has contributed to corporate reluctance to share information.
Since the swell of investments in the semiconductor sector, however, companies have been more willing to share explicitly needed job skills, although some still retain confidentiality around training needs. So trust-building among companies, across service providers, and among workforce agency intermediaries is still an essential goal in each of the regions. Although progress is being made, additional efforts are needed to cultivate a culture of communication and transparency that ultimately results in a real-time “feedback loop” among the companies and with the workforce system partners.
For instance, some companies are still not entirely confident that the compressed training programs being piloted by community colleges actually provide workers with the requisite skill sets. Ideally, with increased transparency, workforce partners can respond to company training needs and innovate, allowing regular upskilling opportunities for workers. This is not the state of best practices right now. But collaborations are ripe for joint problem-solving with public and nonprofit sectors and corporate partners collectively at the table.
Workforce and industry leaders and other local stakeholders now find themselves with unusual incentives to collaborate, transcend barriers, revising the traditional workforce system-industry paradigm while transitioning to a new normal. But it will take time, requiring robust new models to balance near-term employer goals and long-term worker benefits.
Conclusion
Past federal industrial policy and investments are giving way to new strategies for bolstering the semiconductor sector and advance manufacturing under the second Trump administration. Either way, regional training systems and talent pipelines are still heavily impacted by new chips investments, as the companies stand up new and expanded fabs. Workforce system responses rest with state, regional, and local nonprofit and public sector partners, as local stakeholders navigate the impacts of these public and private sector chips investments and the ongoing pressures to meet company needs for requisite supply of trained workers.
Semiconductor sector investments are catalyzing early transformations. But funding alone will not rectify chronic workforce training challenges and gaps, solve decades of disinvestment, repair the fragmentation typical of regional workforce development systems, or do the essential work of reaching and training new populations. Extensive local leadership efforts to innovate and coordinate are needed to turn regional deficits into assets and overcome systemic and institutional challenges. This is happening, but stakeholders will also need strong partners and inspiration.
In moving from the transactional to the transformational, regional leaders interviewed throughout this field research frequently expressed interest in opportunities to share experiences, such as cross-regional convenings or learning labs, to “lift up” new practices and problem-solve. This is a unique moment to leverage the regional momentum of these private, public, and nonprofit sector collaborations, coalescing around solutions that expand the talent pipeline and rewrite the workforce training systems’ playbook.
Sharing challenges and solutions has long-term benefits for advanced manufacturing industries and their workers, as well as for the integrity and efficacy of workforce development systems. Critical questions remain to be answered. And these emergent transformations must be monitored, including how to scale innovations, how to sustain new systems to reach and train new populations, and how these innovations can become transferable and replicable from region to region. Doing so will continue to catalyze change in regional workforce systems across our nation.
Lavea Brachman is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an honorary visiting fellow at the University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning, and the author of this series of issue briefs.
The author expresses deep appreciation to the Lumina Foundation for funding and supporting this work and to colleagues: Martha Ross, Mark Muro, Joe Parilla, Rachel Lipson, Harry Holzer, Annelies Groger, and David Johnson for their review and excellent comments. Any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions are solely the responsibility of the author.