Recently I’ve been reading a lot about the semiconductor industry manpower shortage.
Semiconductor is a wide knowledge subject, and many years of experience are necessary to a professional become useful for the industry. The hand labor shortage we are facing today will not be overcome so soon. This condition started a long time ago, before we could imagine it would be a problem.
I read a lot of articles explaining this shortage of hand labor which I cannot deny that some of these are reasonable but not complete. We should go deeper into this subject. Maybe doing this, we would be able to foresee a solution for a near future.
Let’s dig into analysis to reach a solution … or at least the beginning of the way to solve it …
Manpower Shortage Causes
Till now the reasons for this semiconductor hand labor shortage are:
- It’s global: the manpower shortage it’s not only for specific countries.
- The exponential semiconductor’s demand growth in the past few years is one of the workforce shortage causes.
- As strategic decision, companies decided to replace outsourcing, investing in new fabs, which demands skilled workforce.
- Technical workforce over the years dropped substantially due to automation and lack of opportunity.
- Nationalism with local manufacturing facilities is expanding fast.
- Types of skilled workers: design, process, and machine operator.
Basically, due to the Revolution 4.0, there was a ramp up in the demand for semiconductors devices, and manpower haven’t followed up this growth. But how can we foresee this ramp up? How much, all this, does it impact workforce demand?
(a) Understanding the influence of the ramp up in the demand for semiconductors on the hand labor necessity: we need to have clear in our minds that, the growing demand for devices, resulting in a explosive growth in the semiconductor market, doesn´t follow the same growth path for the workforce.
(b) How to measure it:
A good thermometer to this ramp up is the job market forecast growth for the next 10 years.
I invite you to this challenge! Probably you will see that the rump up of the workforce will be about 4% per year, it jumped from 1% per year to 4% per year. Compared to IT area this is a very small increase.
(c) Semiconductor plants physical localization: geo-localization of the semiconductor plants is limited to a few countries, making it difficult to find talented people in countries outside of this circle. We will always keep our focus in the same hand work market.
(d) Manpower type:
Which type of manpower specifically we need? There are different types of workforces, one is a specialist in semiconductor, who can research and develop new processes, another type is responsible for the design in all details, that uses advanced software, and a third one is the machine operator.
Considering the above classification, we will have a different approach to identify which skills are we looking for. This will allow us to define which professional we really need.
This will prevent us of having young, graduated people that will not get a job in the semiconductor industry, generating less interested in this area.
We can’t forget the technology evolved, and the workforce also need to evolve. That has no influence on the manpower’s decline, because in this area you always need to follow the evolution and evolve with the technology.
What is the conclusion?
I think we are asking the wrong questions, and if we ask wrong questions, we get wrong answers…. And the actions will be based on wrong assumptions.
If we are facing manpower shortage right now, it’s not only because of the ramp up in the semiconductor demand, but much more because of the decrease in the last 20 years on this specific workforce.
IT terms
I learned concepts in the IT industry that has a well fit here, I will explain then first.
PRIMARY KEYS: is a key in a relational database that is unique for each record. It’s a unique identifier, such as a driver license number, telephone number (including area code), or vehicle identification number.
FOREIGN KEYS: A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table. The foreign key links these two tables.
Analysing
So, we should think about some statistics that will help us in our analysis. How many bachelors in electronic, materials science, engineering have been graduated in the past 20 years? How many of them went to work with engineering, how many of them got a MSC or PHD in semiconductor?
I’m pretty sure that if we are going through that information, we would be able to see the falling tendency.
The job market in semiconductor is not a growing market like in IT, it grows slowly, most of the time. Let’s reinforce that you need several years to get an experienced professional.
Why is this happening?
1. Behavioral:
The semiconductor industry is very particular, and this prevent it to overcome this problem.
Even if we think in state-of-the-art technology, the behavior of this industry with their workforce is not so stimulating, it’s a conservative industry, where hand labor evaluation misconception needs to be broken.
It’s not too difficult to understand that, even knowing semiconductor physics are similar for bipolar and MOS, the processes are basically the same, who works with bipolar devices is not accepted by CMOS devices industries.
Let’s dive deeper.
To enter in this industry, the only way is going through universities, MSC, PHD, when MSC and PHD not necessarily are needed. To have access for workshops, symposiums, events in this area, most of them, which could help to raise interest in this area, are closed events, costing huge amounts of money to participate.
There are not so many courses in this area focused on manufacturing, and if there is, they are so expensive, that a lot of people don´t even think about going on.
We cannot forget the discrimination based in sex, race, nationality… There are many documents showing that although 47% of the global workforce are women, we have only 10-25% of the women as semiconductor workforce.
2. Job’s Specifications:
We should understand what is going on with job’s specifications. I read a lot of job descriptions, it’s quite an enigma to understand what they are really looking for… I started to question myself if they know exactly what they are looking for.
As an example, I saw a job position where they were requesting someone to develop a wet etch process, but the specifications for this job required knowledge only in dry etch processes, having knowledge in wet etch was the only thing that wasn’t important … and that wasn’t the only one!
Another example, how many jobs they are looking for machine operator specialist and put that in the same context of a semiconductor specialist. They are both fundamentals for the semiconductor industry, but they require completely different profiles.
3. Link company-workforce:
The link between the company and the workforce needs to be improved. The way AI have been used to filter candidates, is killing great minds. Job specifications need to be precisely specified, the specifications need to look for “primary keys”, not for “foreign keys”, and its interpretation needs urgently to be reviewed. If there is so much lack in this workforce, why are there great professionals that are not able to find jobs?
We should look for the IT industry and learn with them, there are open courses to who want to learn, there are bootcamps to be near the workforce and analyze their work, there are also many free workshops. What do they get with that, a lot of creative and fantastic workforce.
The Revolution 4.0 tendency will need much more innovation in the semiconductor area, but we need to change our mindset to follow that.
We could be in a different situation right now, we could be much more evolved in every single aspect, even with our technology, but to do that we urgently need to open our mind and change our mindset, we need to return to be creative in all aspects, after all this is the driving force for semiconductors, don’t you agree?
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