U.S. Department of Commerce

U.S. Department of Commerce
Chips for America

We Have the Billions, Now We Need the Brains.

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Arizona. Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum

Manufacturing incentives mean nothing without the human capital to run them.

With the semiconductor industry facing a massive talent crisis, I was invited to advise the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) on a nationwide workforce marketing strategy.

Every effective marketing intervention lives or dies on diagnosis.

On a national scale, this diagnosis was exceptionally brutal. The hard data revealed a catastrophic bottleneck: 58% of one million new jobs—and 80% of new technician roles—were on track to go completely unfilled by 2030.

The structural challenge wasn't just a number; it was a deep-seated cultural blindness. The multi-billion-dollar semiconductor manufacturing sector historically operated under an invisibility cloak, hidden away from public view. This created two opposing, yet equally damaging, perception traps:

Top engineering students were graduating without even knowing the domestic chip industry existed.

Community college students and tradespeople — the vital lifeblood of factory cleanrooms falsely assumed these advanced career pathways — were exclusively reserved for elite scientists and doctorate holders.

"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 the internal committee rooms was equally tough. The project sat at the intersection of a massive, heavily siloed bureaucratic matrix—bringing together powerful, competing entities that included the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, major corporate CEOs, and academic institutions.

Among these highly credentialed actors, the default reflex was an immediate, alarming rush to tactics. Committee members routinely put the executional cart before the horse, defaulting to social media and digital content before we had even defined our core objectives.

My role was to strip back the industry's "stale commodity" reputation, and unify a myriad of stakeholders to ground their historic capital investment in an authentic, long-term marketing strategy.

While long-term labor pipeline metrics will take a generation to fully materialize, the immediate, high-stakes benchmark of success for this assignment was strategic alignment.

To replace the short-term, fragmented, tactical bias with a clear blueprint for broad market reach and mental availability, a comprehensive marketing strategy was delivered to the committee. Grounded in this framework, the working group's recommendations were formally adopted during the August 1, 2024 IAC Session and advanced directly to the Department of Commerce as the official national roadmap:

Central Marketing Hub: The committee explicitly approved creating a unifying hub for promotional materials. This underpinned the broader launch of the NSTC Workforce Center of Excellence to unify outreach.
Mass-Market Targeting: Target students, veterans, parents, and the public across the nation, focusing intensively on underserved areas and regions where semiconductor investment is high but graduates are low.
Strategic Positioning: Anchor campaign development and around the idea of the 'Power of Collective Difference to Make a Difference'.