U.S. Department of Commerce

Department of Commerce
CHIPS for America

We Have the Billions, Now We Need the Brains.

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Micron groundbreaking ceremony in Clay, New York. Photo: Marilyn Hesler

The $820+ billion flowing into 160 semiconductor projects across 30 states is driving the largest U.S. infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing renaissance since World War II. But capital commitments do not run fabrication lines. By 2030, a shortage of as many as 157,000 skilled workers could become the bottleneck that slows the entire buildout.

I didn’t wait to be invited to the table. The stakes were too consequential — for America’s long-term prosperity, technological leadership, and national security.

Before the CHIPS and Science Act was signed into law, I drew on two decades of work building brand fame and market value for Applied Materials, Marvell, Arm, KLA, and Micron. I initiated an unpaid effort — reading the research, making the calls, and engaging with industry executives, trade associations, and academic leaders.

That work eventually opened the right door: a formal invitation to advise the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) R&D Workforce Working Group on a nationwide semiconductor-workforce marketing strategy.

A Financial Times film exploring America's chip war with China.

The workforce-development ecosystem’s default reflex was to treat this as a basic awareness problem. But awareness was not the problem. In 2021, the chip industry was impossible to miss — synonymous as it was with pandemic-era shortages and supply-chain gridlock. To find out what we were really up against, I mapped where capital was being concentrated against where the human pipeline broke down. The data revealed deep, structural friction:

Top-of-Funnel Deficit: Although capital had flowed into a sea of standalone, fragmented PR initiatives, the industry had failed to establish the “mental availability” needed to become an instinctive, default choice when a student first considers a career. Future engineering talent still dreams of working for iconic software giants — or perhaps an agile start-up hell-bent on changing the world. The semiconductor industry is largely off their radar, perceived as a stale, soulless manufacturer of a commodity.

Mid-to-Bottom-of-Funnel Leakage: Both ends of the educational spectrum were bleeding. Top-tier university engineering students graduate largely blind to the domestic chip industry; only about 1,500 engineers enter the sector each year — roughly 3% of engineering graduates who go into engineering roles.

Meanwhile, community-college and vocational students prematurely filter themselves out of the talent pool, assuming semiconductor careers are reserved for PhDs — or, paradoxically, picturing a gruelling, high-stress, always-on factory environment.

The research confirmed that this was neither a shortage-of-jobs problem nor an awareness problem. It was a market-orientation problem. The industry had to become easier to think of, easier to understand and easier to choose — at the moments when students, parents, teachers and career-changers first begin to imagine a future. That meant building long-term memory structures. But it also meant changing the offer itself: reassessing the language used to describe semiconductor careers; clarifying what those careers actually are; addressing the perceived costs and rewards of choosing them; and making education and training more accessible.

Micron Idaho. Photo: Todd Meier

"We have to nail the implementation of the CHIPS and Science 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 directly into a massive, heavily siloed bureaucratic matrix. The CHIPS and Science Act sits at the volatile intersection of powerful, competing entities: major corporate CEOs, federal science agencies, the Department of Defense, and a fragmented sea of academic institutions and regional economic-development groups.

Among these highly credentialed actors, the default reflex fractured into two opposing extremes. Some bogged progress down in year-long academic deliberation, delaying approved initiatives until real-world urgency was lost. Others put the tactical cart before the strategic horse, frantically prioritizing local social media plans and digital content before we had completed the diagnosis or aligned on segmentation, positioning and objectives.

The first pattern was not theoretical. In May 2023, I helped shape an American Semiconductor Academy (ASA) / SEMI Foundation proposal to pilot a National Microelectronics Education Network Coordination Hub. Intel, Micron, and Apple approved the framework and committed matching corporate funds. However, even though the National Science Foundation (NSF) agreed to match that collective capital, they decided to redirect the momentum back into additional committee meetings and workshops.

All we could do was dust ourselves off, bypass the gridlock, and go again.

August 1, 2024 IAC Session

At the end of the day, my job was not to add another communications plan to the pile. It was to help thousands of people across the country, all trying to solve the same problem, agree on what the problem really was — and give them a strategy and a central unifying idea to rally behind.

On May 10, 2024, I presented the final draft of a Marketing Strategy to the IAC, and recommended the SEMI Foundation host a central marketing hub to help unify a fragmented landscape by aligning education and training with industry demand, coordinating communications, tracking enrollment outcomes, and extending access to underrepresented communities nationwide.

On August 1, 2024, R&D Workforce Working Group Chair Tsu-Jae King Liu presented the IAC’s findings to the U.S. Department of Commerce, where each recommendation was approved by consensus vote.

Federal Alliance: In July 2024, the NSF and the CHIPS for America R&D Office at NIST signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on semiconductor workforce development. The agreement set out to provide up to $30 million over five years for a Network Coordination Hub and the National Network for Microelectronics Education (NNME) — an operational model reflecting the ASA–SEMI blueprint we helped develop in 2023.
Strategic Sequencing: With the joint NSF–DOC framework in place before the IAC’s August session, the committee could consider the full range of opportunities, challenges and strategies presented by its invited speakers.
National Expansion: On May 26, 2026, the SEMI Foundation, acting as the Hub Operator for the NNME, launched the network's first four Regional Nodes, officially activating a nationwide ecosystem comprised of more than 325 partner organizations.