Whitty Worldwide is an elite team of highly trained
creative professionals who live or die on their ability to
surprise people, cut through the crap and do the impossible.
We deliver big, bold, game changing ideas without the overhead
and complicated, time wasting process you'll find in most agencies.
Whether you need a broad reach fame building campaign,
or a targeted message people find engaging and useful -
we are ready to take your brief.
Whitty Worldwide is an elite team of highly trained
creative professionals who live or die on their ability to
surprise people, cut through the crap and do the impossible.
We deliver big, bold, game changing ideas without the overhead
and complicated, time wasting process you'll find in most agencies.
Whether you need a broad reach fame building campaign,
or a targeted message people find engaging and useful -
we are ready to take your brief.
Department of Commerce
CHIPS for America
We Have the Billions, Now We Need the Brains.
Arizona. Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum
A growing nationwide shortage of highly skilled workers threatens to constrain the chip production on which U.S. economic and national security depends.
I didn't wait to be invited. Before the CHIPS & Science Act was signed into law, I began consulting with industry executives, trade associations, academic leaders, and government entities to frame the fundamental problem that no one owned: the workforce development ecosystem was complex, siloed, and fragmented (read: unfit for purpose).
Backed by two decades of experience alongside industry leaders like Micron, Applied Materials, Marvell, KLA, and ARM, that early groundwork led to a formal invitation to advise the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) on a nationwide workforce marketing strategy.
Effective marketing lives or dies on diagnosis. Our data analysis confirmed a catastrophic reality: if we do not bridge the current skills gap, 58% of the 115,000 new jobs created in the U.S. by 2030 risk going unfilled.
The dearth of talent risks stalling plans by TSMC to invest $265 billion in a dozen chipmaking and packaging facilities in Arizona, as well as Micron Technology Inc.'s vision to spend $100 billion on memory chip production in New York and Samsung Electronics Co.'s logic chip facility in Texas. And Intel Corp.'s delayed $28 billion investment in Ohio is set for shortages once production ramps up.
Left unresolved, this labor gap risks turning historic private investment and CHIPS & Science Act funding into half-built capacity rather than durable U.S. leadership in advanced manufacturing.
Micron. Photo: Todd Meier
From a positioning and brand image standpoint, our market orientation research revealed that this structural challenge stems from a deep, systemic cultural blind spot. Chip fabrication plants operate completely offstage under an invisibility cloak, silently interceding between flashy product designers and even flashier modern marketers.
This hidden existence creates two distinct, equally damaging realities across the talent funnel:
Top-of-Funnel Deficit (95% "Out-of-Market"): Looking a generation ahead, the semiconductor industry has entirely failed to build broad mental availability. Potential candidates dream of engineering at iconic tech giants with massive cultural footprints, or being part of a "cool" start-up, or making heroic impact working on the absolute frontier of technology. If and when people think of chips, it is broadly perceived as a stale, soulless commodity.
Mid-Funnel Leakage (5% "In-Market"): Top-tier university engineering students largely graduate completely blind to the domestic chip industry—with only 3% of engineering graduates entering the sector annually. Meanwhile, community college and vocational students prematurely filter themselves out of the talent pool, either incorrectly assuming cleanroom careers are strictly reserved for PhDs, or picturing grueling, high-stress factory labor instead of modern, balanced technical careers.
Compounding this, because nano-engineering is so hyper-advanced and capital-intensive, most educational institutions from secondary school up to university level lack the infrastructure to properly educate and train students for the modern fab, leaving a gaping chasm between academic theory and operational reality.
"We have to nail the implementation of the CHIPS Act. We have to execute like every detail matters because it does, and we have to be bold enough with our vision, which is why I liken it to the space race."
Gina Raimondo, U.S. Secretary of Commerce
Navigating an assignment of this scale and complexity meant stepping into a massive, heavily siloed bureaucratic matrix. The CHIPS & Science Act sits at the intersection of powerful, competing entities—major corporate CEOs, federal science agencies, the Department of Defense, a myriad of academic institutions, and economic development agencies.
Among these highly credentialed actors, the default reflex fractured into two opposing extremes. Some bogged progress down in year-long academic workshopping, delaying approved and budgeted initiatives until real-world urgency was lost. Others put the tactical cart before the strategic horse, frantically prioritizing localized social media plans and digital content ideas before we had completed our diagnosis or aligned on objectives.
Wrestling these discussions back to proper marketing discipline meant filling a leadership void: steering stakeholders away from a myopic obsession with communication and toward the complete marketing mix. Our diagnosis showed the true friction points did not live in "advertising." They lived in Product (re-engineering education and training curricula), Price (addressing the affordability and financial accessibility of training programs), and Place (optimizing talent distribution channels directly into regional fab ecosystems).
August 1, 2024 IAC Session
While long-term labor pipeline metrics take a generation to fully materialize, the immediate, high-stakes benchmark of success was strategic alignment and unification—coordinating the full marketing mix, not just promotion.
On May 10, 2024, I presented a Workforce Development Marketing Strategy, including a recommendation for a SEMI Foundation-hosted national Workforce Development Marketing Hub. On August 1, 2024, this recommendation was formally presented by R&D Workforce Working Group Chair Tsu-Jae King Liu and approved by consensus vote, becoming part of the Working Group’s official recommendations to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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Federal Alliance: In July 2024—before the August IAC vote—the Department of Commerce and the National Science Foundation had already signed a parallel $30 million, five-year commitment to fund a national coordination hub for microelectronics education. When the operator was later selected, it was the SEMI Foundation.
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National Expansion: In May 2026, the SEMI Foundation officially launched the first four Regional Nodes of the National Network for Microelectronics Education, with a mandate to align training with current semiconductor industry needs, manage communication across the regional training hubs, monitor program metrics and workforce enrollment success, and expand outreach to underrepresented communities in STEM.
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Strategic Roadmap: Our recommended strategy also included a national campaign framework—targeting students, veterans, parents, and underserved communities across high-investment, low-graduate regions—and a two-speed measurement architecture separating long-term brand building from short-term conversion. Both await funding as the Hub scales.
Source: Semiconductor Industry Association / Oxford Economics. McKinsey & Co. The CHIPS R&D Office.
"Whitty provided marketing insight for attracting a larger and more diverse pool of talent to the semiconductor industry"
Tsu-Jae King Liu
R&D WorkforceWorking Group Chair
University of California Berkeley
Services
Research & Diagnosis
Marketing Strategy
Principals
G. Raimondo, Sec. of Commerce
L. Locascio, Under Sec. of Commerce
Collaborators
Tsu-Jae King Liu, IAC
Shari Liss, SEMI Foundation
See other work
