Wearing protective gear and masks, students toured advanced semiconductor machines as part of camps organized by chip firms and universities to attract talent, amid concerns about sustaining Taiwan’s semiconductor workforce due to a falling birth rate.

Taipei

Taiwan is organizing summer camps aimed at attracting young talent to its crucial semiconductor industry. These camps, attended by students from multiple countries, provide hands-on exposure to chip manufacturing processes and are part of broader efforts by companies and universities to address a looming workforce shortage.

The initiative comes as Taiwan experiences a significant drop in birth rates and STEM graduates, leading to concerns about filling critical roles in the sector. With major companies like TSMC and NVIDIA expanding their presence, the industry is seeing a sharp rise in job openings, but is struggling to find enough qualified local talent.

Taiwan aims for young chips talent with summer camps

White suits, masks, and a front-row view of machines that craft cutting-edge microchips. It's all another day at a summer camp designed to drum up kids' interest in the most important industry here in Taiwan, the semiconductors that power most of the globe's electronics and AI servers. However, a declining birth rate could leave tens of thousands of critical jobs vacant. So from etching to lithography, some 80 students from eight countries get to see every step up close. Sixteen-year-old Nicholas Choi from Singapore was one of them. I'd say that a lot of these tech companies are interesting to me because I myself really enjoy playing video games. So I'm really just always using these semiconductor products. And so to me, most of these companies are really interesting. It's one of many events like it in recent years, held by companies and Taiwan's universities as demand for chips surges around the world. The camp has been held by U.S.-based chip designer Synopsys since 2023, but this was the first year it was hosted in Mandarin as well as English, a sign of how worries have grown over Taiwan's aging population. Seventeen-year-old Caroline Choi sees it all as an attractive career choice. I'm thinking of pursuing a major in software engineering and economy in university next year. So I think it was a pretty good introduction to the field I'd like to go in. Taiwan's role in the chip supply chain is huge. Native company TSMC is the world's largest contract chip maker. Any decline in this industry dominance threatens Taiwan's existence. The island faces the threat of invasion from Beijing, but Taiwan draws much of its global significance from chip giants like TSMC. But yearly births fell by 35 percent in 10 years from 2014 to 2024, and STEM graduates fell 10 percent during the same period. As tech giants NVIDIA increased their presence in Taiwan to stay close to the supply chain, chip companies and experts warn that it's becoming increasingly hard to find local talent with the declining student population. Job openings in the sector rose from 19,401 in the second quarter of 2020 to 33,725 this year. According to a local human resources firm, the industry is grappling with a shortage of both highly skilled professionals from circuit design and R&D engineers to essential production staff, including operators and assembly technicians.

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