Executive Summary

Over the past decade, the United States has sought to rebuild a larger share of leading-edge domestic production capacity of semiconductors to reduce geographic concentration risk and improve supply chain resilience. However, fabrication facilities (fabs) cannot operate at scale without a steady pipeline of workers with specialized skills, experience, and readiness to work in high-reliability cleanroom environments.

This report focuses on the workforce required to expand and sustain U.S.-based semiconductor fabrication. It is intentionally scoped to front-end manufacturing, where process complexity, equipment intensity, and quality demands make talent constraints especially binding. This focus is motivated by the distinctive workforce profile of fabs: a mix of highly credentialed engineers and scientists, experienced tool and facilities technicians, and production-line roles where the bottleneck is often not formal education alone but job-specific competencies and retention in demanding working conditions.

Methods

To better understand policy issues surrounding the demand for skilled semiconductor workers, this report reviews existing literature produced by semiconductor industry groups, government agencies, academic journals, and news media. The Center for Security and Emerging Technology also hosted a roundtable discussion in May 2025 to ask industry stakeholders for their perspectives on issues raised in the literature review. Attendees represented a wide variety of stakeholders from the semiconductor industry, trade associations, and government agencies. Their comments provided a more current picture of the issues facing the workforce than was available in published literature from recent years.

The report also incorporates summary statistics for skills demands in semiconductor manufacturing from a set of recent U.S. job postings provided by Lightcast. To isolate this sample of job postings, we gathered a list of firms that operated foundries from the Semiconductor Industry Association and a list of semiconductor manufacturing occupations from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We then developed a list of keywords that were related to each step of the production process, in order to exclude jobs that were unrelated to semiconductor manufacturing.

Findings

• Our analysis found 3,441 U.S. semiconductor manufacturing job postings in the observation period from January 2023 to April 2025.
• While job postings are concentrated among a few large employers, there are many manufacturers with smaller numbers of job postings. Thirty-one employers were represented in our sample.
• Job postings are concentrated in states where major employers are located, and these states are distributed across the United States. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia are represented in our sample.
• Engineering and technician roles make up the most common occupations among the 85 separate O*NET occupations covered in job postings, reflecting a wide range of required education and training.
• Semiconductor manufacturing jobs require a mix of soft skills and technical skills, but certain skills like electronics manufacturing and micro manufacturing appear many times more often in our sample than in jobs overall.

Recommendations

Tailor workforce training to skills demands. Based on their frequency in postings, both industry-specific technical skills and soft skills that can be utilized across industries are in high demand. Formal degree programs in relevant fields and work experience programs such as registered apprenticeships should coordinate with employers to ensure that workers receive instruction in necessary skills.

Recruit skilled immigrants and underrepresented talent. One avenue for expanding the semiconductor workforce is through outreach to underrepresented groups, such as female, African American, and Hispanic workers. Establishing mentorship programs at colleges and employers can help retain these workers and advance their careers. Meanwhile, expanding immigration pathways would grow the number of foreign-born skilled workers that are eligible for these roles.

Invest in industry clusters for long-term growth. Building training facilities to offer hands-on experience with manufacturing equipment likely exceeds the budgets of most colleges. Instead, colleges should form partnerships with employers to provide adequate access to training facilities. Physically locating employers near sources of talent also facilitates transfers of knowledge, capital, and talent that pays dividends on long-term investments being made in training, equipment, and construction.