Missing Links for an Advanced Workforce

Recent investments in the US advanced manufacturing industry have generated a national workforce demand. However, meeting this demand for workers—particularly technicians—is inhibited by a skills gap. In the sector of microelectronics manufacturing, it is critical that we not only pursue effective technician education but also minimize barriers that hinder quality of education and program completion. For example, there are limited accessible avenues for students to gain hands-on industry experiences. Educational programs also face difficulties coordinating curriculum with local workforce needs. In “The Technologist” (Issues, Winter 2024), John Liu and William Bonvillian suggest an educational pathway targeting these challenges. Their proposals align with our efforts at the Micro Nano Technology Education Center (MNT-EC) to effectively train microelectronic industry technicians.

As the authors highlight, we must strengthen the connective tissue across the workforce education system. MNT-EC was founded with the understanding that there is strength in community bonds. We facilitate partnerships between students, educators, and industry groups to offer support, mentoring, and connections to grow the technician workforce. As part of our community of practice, we partner with over 40 community colleges in a coordinated national approach to advance microelectronic technician education. Our programs include an internship connector, which directs students toward hands-on laboratory education; a mentorship program supporting grant-seeking educators; and an undergraduate research program that backs students in two-year technical education programs.

These programs highlight community colleges’ critical partnership role within the advanced manufacturing ecosystem. As Liu and Bonvillian note, community colleges have unique attributes: connections to their local region, diverse student bodies, and workforce orientations. Ivy Tech Community College, one of MNT-EC’s partners, is featured in the article as an institution utilizing its strengths to educate new technologists. Ivy Tech, as well as other MNT-EC partners, understands that modern manufacturing technicians must develop innovative systems thinking alongside strong technical skills. To implement these goals, Ivy Tech participates in a partnership initiative funded by Silicon Crossroads Microelectronics Commons Hub. Ivy Tech works with Purdue University and Synopsis to develop a pathway that provides community college technician graduates with a one-year program at Purdue, followed by employment at Synopsis. This program embodies the “technologist” education, bridging technical education content taught at community colleges with engineering content at Purdue.

As we collectively develop this educational pathway for producing technologists, I offer two critical questions for consideration. First, how can we recruit and retain the dedicated technicians who will evolve into technologists? MNT-EC has undertaken strategic outreach to boost awareness of the advanced manufacturing industry. However, recruitment and retention remain a national challenge. Second, how can we ensure adequate and sustained funding to support community colleges in this partnership? Investing in the nation’s manufacturing workforce by building effective educational programs that support future technologists capable of meeting industry needs will take a team and take funding.

Jared M. Ashcroft

Justine Gluck

Jennifer P. Hipp

Anyone concerned about the state of US manufacturing should read with care John Liu and William B. Bonvillian’s essay. They propose a new occupational category that they maintain can both create opportunities for workers and position the United States to lead in advance manufacturing.

Their newly coined job, “technologist,” requires “workers with a technician’s practical know-how and an engineer’s comprehension of processes and systems.” This effectively recognizes that without an intimate connection between innovation (where the United States leads) and manufacturing (where it lags), the lead will dissipate, as recent history has demonstrated. In this context, the authors lament the US underinvestment in workforce education and particularly the low funding for community colleges, which can serve as critical cogs in training skilled workers.

Indeed, the availability of a skilled workforce ready to support twenty-first century production is the most significant and immediate problem the United States faces in trying to restore its overall manufacturing capability. And semiconductors are on the front line in the struggle. A report released in December 2023 by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, Assessment of the Status of the Microelectronics Industrial Base in the United States, which summarizes industry respondents to a survey, “consistently identified workforce-related challenges as the most crucial to their business,” with respondents most frequently citing workforce-related issues (e.g., labor availability, labor cost, and labor quality) as important to expansion or construction decisions.

Other data support this perception. A July 2023 report from the Semiconductor Industry Association, Chipping Away: Assessing and Addressing the Labor Market Gap Facing the U.S. Semiconductor Industry, projects that by 2030 the semiconductor’s workforce will grow to 460,000 jobs from 345,000 jobs, with 67,000 jobs at risk of going unfilled at current degree completion rates. And this problem is economywide: by the end of 2030, an estimated 3.85 million additional jobs requiring proficiency in technical fields will be created—with 1.4 million jobs at risk of going unfilled.

The US CHIPS and Science Act, passed in 2022, appropriated over $52 billion in grants, plus tens of billions more in tax credits and loan authorization, through new programs at the Department of Defense, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Science Foundation. Central to these new initiatives is workforce development. For example, all new CHIPS programs must include commitments to provide workforce training. In addition, NIST’s National Semiconductor Technology Center proposes establishing a Workforce Center of Excellence, a national “hub” to convene, coordinate, and set standards for the highly decentralized and fragmented workforce delivery system.

To rapidly scale up regionally structured programs to meet the demand, it is wise to examine existing initiatives that have demonstrated success and can serve as replicable models. Two examples with a national footprint are:

• NIST’s Manufacturing Extension Program has built a sustained business model in all states by helping firms reconfigure their operations through lean manufacturing practices, including shop floor reorganization. And the market for this service is not just tiny machine shops, but also enterprises with up to 500 employees, which represent over 95% of all manufacturing entities and employ 50% of all workers.
• The National Institute for Innovation and Technology, a nonprofit sponsored by the Department of Labor, has developed an innovative Registered Apprenticeship Program in collaboration with industry. Several leading semiconductor companies are using the system to attract unprecedented numbers of motivated workers.

Liu and Bonvillian have described a creative approach to the major impediment to restoring US manufacturing. Rapid national scale-up is essential to success.

Phillip Singerman

Effective recruitment and training programs are often billed as the key to creating the deep and capable talent pool needed by the nation’s industrial base. The task of creating them, however, has proven Sisyphean for educators. Pathways nationwide are afflicted with the same trio of problems: lagging enrollment; high attrition; and disappointing problem solving, creative thinking, and critical reasoning skills in graduates.

In response to these anemic results, the government has increased funding for manufacturing programs, hoping educators can produce the desired talent through improved outreach and instruction. Looking at the causes of the key problems, however, reveals that even the best programs, such as the one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that John Liu and William B. Bonvillian describe, are limited in their potential to solve them.

Recruitment is primarily hamstrung by the sector’s low wages (particularly at the entry level for workers with less than a bachelor’s degree). In many markets, entry-level technician compensation is on par with that offered by burger chains and big box stores. Technologist salaries ring in higher, but many promising candidates (especially high schoolers) opt for a bachelor’s degree instead, because the return on investment is often better. Until that math changes, technician/technologist pathways will never outmatch the competition from other sectors or four-year degrees, both of which pay more, provide a more attractive job structure, or both.

Furthermore, educators cannot easily teach skills such as aptitude for innovation and technical agility in class: students master theory in school and practical application on the job. As a former Apple engineer explained to me, it is not until entering the workforce that people are routinely exposed to the conditions that develop diversity of thought: open-ended problems that require workers to engage with an infinite solution space to arrive at an answer. While approaches like project-based learning can help students acquire a foundation prior to graduation, companies must accept that the bulk of the learning that drives creativity and problem solving will take place on the factory floor, not in the classroom.

This means that to address the nation’s manufacturing workforce shortcomings, we must turn to industry, not education. Compensation needs to be raised to reflect the complexity and effort demanded by manufacturing jobs when compared with other positions that pay similar wages. Companies also need to embrace their role as a critical learning environment. Translating classroom-based knowledge into real-world skill takes time and effort by both students and industry. Many European countries with strong manufacturing economies run multiyear apprenticeship programs in recognition of this fact. To date, the United States has resisted the investment and cooperation required to create a strong national apprenticeship program. Unless and until that changes, we should not expect our recent graduates to have the experience and skill of their European counterparts.

In sum, programs such as the one at MIT should be replicated in every manufacturing market across the nation. But in the absence of competitive compensation and scaled apprenticeships, educators cannot create a labor pool with the quantity of candidates or technical chops to shore up the country’s industrial sector.

Emily McGrath

John Liu and William B. Bonvillian make a compelling case for bridging the gap between engineers and technicians to support the US government’s efforts for reshoring and reindustrialization. They call for new training programs to produce people with a skill level between technician and engineer—or “technologists,” in their coinage. But before creating new programs, we should examine how the authors’ vision might fit within the nation’s existing educational system.

It is surprising that Liu and Bonvillian don’t explain how their new field differs from one that already bridges the technician-engineer gap: engineering technology. Engineering technology programs offer degrees at the associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, and even PhD levels. And the programs graduate substantial numbers of students. According to the US Department of Education, more than 50,000 associate’s and 18,000 bachelor’s degrees in engineering technology were awarded in 2021–22. The number of bachelor’s degrees represents about 15% of all engineering degrees awarded during that period. The field also has a strong institutional foothold. Programs are accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology and the field has an established Classification of Instructional Programs code (15.00).

Engineering and engineering technology programs have roots that go back to the late nineteenth century. They were not completely distinct from one another until the 1950s, when engineering schools adopted many of the curricular recommendations made by an American Society of Engineering Education’s 1955 report, commonly known as the Grinter Report, and made engineering education more “scientifically oriented.” Engineering technology programs tend to require less advanced mathematics and science but much more applied and implementation work with real-world equipment.

A more recent report from the National Academies, Engineering Technology Education in the United States, published in 2017, describes the state of the field, its evolution, and the need to elevate its branding and visibility among students, workers, educators, and employers. The report describes graduates of engineering technology programs as technologists, the same job title Liu and Bonvillian use for their new type of worker who possesses skills that combine what they term “a technician’s practical know-how and an engineer’s comprehension of processes and systems.”

The preface of the National Academies report provides a warning to those taking a “build it and they will come” approach. It states that engineering technology, despite its importance, is “unfamiliar to most Americans and goes unmentioned in most policy discussions about the US technical workforce.” Liu and Bonvillian are advocating that a new, apparently similar, field be created. How do they ensure it won’t suffer the same fate?

The market gap that the authors identify, along with the lack of awareness about engineering technology, point to a deeper problem in the US workforce development system: employers are no longer viewed as being responsible for taking the lead role in guiding and investing in workforce development. Employers are the ones that can specify skills needs, and they profit from properly trained workers, yet we have come to expect too little from them. Until we shift the policy conversation by asking employers to do more, creating programs that develop technologists will fail to live up to Liu and Bonvillian’s hopeful vision.

Ron Hira

John Liu and William Bonvillian put forth a thoughtful proposal that US manufacturing needs a new occupational category called “technologist,” a mid-level position sitting between technician and engineer. To produce more of this new breed, the authors encourage community colleges to deliver technologist education, particularly by adopting the curricula framework used in an online program in manufacturing run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And in a bit of good news, the US Defense Department has started funding its adaptation for technologist education.

But more is needed. In scaling up technologist programs across community colleges, Liu and Bonvillian propose focusing first on new students, followed by programs for incumbent workers. I might suggest the inverse strategy to center job quality in the creation of technologist jobs. In this regard, the authors state something critically important: “to incentivize and enable workers to pursue educational advances in manufacturing, companies need to offer high-wage jobs to employees.” Here, the United States might take some lessons from Germany, where manufacturers pay their employees 60% more than US companies do, have a robust apprenticeship system, and generally prioritize investments in human capital over capital equipment purchases.

For too long, US workforce policy has prioritized primarily employer needs. It’s time to add back workers at the heart of workforce policy, as my colleague Mary Alice McCarthy recently argued in a coauthored article in DC Journal. Efforts by community colleges can be important here. By partnering with employers, labor unions, and manufacturing intermediaries such as federal Manufacturing Extension Partnerships to upskill incumbent technicians to become technologists, community colleges can expand upward mobility for workers who are part of the 40 million “some college, no degree” population and set the stage for discussing competitive wages and job quality with employers. Plus, they can ensure that these bold new programs are aligned with employers’ needs—especially critical for emerging jobs.

Indeed, the million-plus workers already employed across 56,000 companies within the US industrial base represent an opportunity to recruit program enrollees and provide mobility in a critical sector of manufacturing that arguably ought to be at the forefront of technologist-enabled digital transformation. Then, with the technologist role cemented in manufacturing—with fair pay—community colleges can turn to recruiting new students for the new occupation.

Policymakers should also consider ways to promote competitive pay and job quality as they fund and promote technologist education. Renewing worker power in manufacturing is one such avenue. Here, labor unions can prove useful. The politics of unions have changed. An August 2023 Gallup poll found that 67% of respondents approved of labor unions on the heels of a summer when both President Biden and former President Trump made history by joining picket lines during the United Auto Workers strike.

The time is right for manufacturing technologists. New federal funding, such as through the National Science Foundation’s Enabling Partnerships to Increase Innovation Capacity program and the Experiential Learning for Emerging and Novel Technologies program, is optimally suited to boost technologist program creation at community colleges. But even with such added support, ensuring that technologist jobs are quality jobs ought to be an imperative for employers who will benefit by bringing the authors’ sensible and needed vision to fruition.

Shalin Jyotishi