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When Hans Juliano was looking to go abroad for a master’s degree in semiconductors, the Indonesian student initially considered Japan and South Korea. But he wasn’t eligible for a scholarship because he didn’t know the language. His friends studying in Taiwan connected him to their professors, who offered him a scholarship.
“It’s quite easy to get a scholarship in Taiwan. You just need your English proficiency test,” Juliano, 23, told Rest of World. He’s now in the second year of a master’s degree at the National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) in Hsinchu, known as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley.
Juliano is among a growing number of students from Southeast Asia going for graduate studies to Taiwan as the hype around artificial intelligence shines a spotlight on its semiconductor industry. For Taiwan, the world’s top semiconductor manufacturer, the interest of students like Juliano is welcome as it grapples with a severe talent shortage.
While the industry worldwide faces a gap in the entire chip supply chain from design to manufacture, the scarcity is more consequential for Taiwan. Its companies produce most of the world’s cutting-edge semiconductor chips that tech giants like Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm rely on, and the industry contributes to about 15% of the island’s gross domestic product.
“As Taiwanese semiconductor companies like TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] expand their operations, the need for skilled workers has increased,” Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research, told Rest of World. “Without sufficient talent, chip makers in Taiwan could face delays in innovation and production,” he said.
Nearly 23,000 jobs were available in the island’s semiconductor industry every month in the second quarter of 2023, according to Taiwanese recruitment firm 104 Job Bank. Though demand was down by more than a third compared to the previous year’s peak, the talent shortage remains “significant,” the company noted in its latest report.
Taiwan chip makers have long relied on local talent, but that is no longer sufficient because of declining birth rates, lower enrollments in engineering courses, and falling interest in jobs at fabrication facilities (known as “fabs”), according to Chih-Huang Lai, associate dean at the College of Semiconductor Research at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU).
“We have very good engineers who can be on standby 24 hours a day,” Lai told Rest of World. “But the younger generation, I don’t think they really want to do this anymore.”
15% The percentage of Taiwan’s GDP made up by the semiconductor industry.
As Taiwan looks to fill the gap, “it’s no surprise” that it is looking to Southeast Asia, Jack Sun, dean of Industry Academia Innovation School, a chip academy at NYCU, told Rest of World. The region has geographical proximity, good school systems, and large ethnic Chinese populations, he said.
At the same time, Taiwanese semiconductor companies are also expanding in Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. “So these companies would love to have more talent and engineers from the places where new fabs, new manufacturing sites, design sites or testing sites are,” said Sun, who retired as TSMC’s chief technology officer in 2018. “It’s kind of a win-win situation.”
Competition for talent is heating up. There could be a gap of more than 100,000 engineers each in the semiconductor sectors in the United States and Europe, and more than 200,000 in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding China, according to a recent report from consulting firm McKinsey.
The Taiwan government is backing its companies in their search. Last year, the Ministry of Economic Affairs began organizing recruiting missions to Southeast Asia. Six chip companies, including TSMC, ASE Technology Holding, and MediaTek, joined the tours to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. They recruited a total of 316 candidates to work or study in Taiwan — a “very good” outcome, one of the organizers told Rest of World.
“The Taiwanese government has been establishing cooperation with the Southeast Asian countries because we want to not rely on China,” said the organizer, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. And the students were drawn to the “much more attractive salaries compared to their home countries.”
Universities in Taiwan have also been conducting research projects and student exchanges with their counterparts in Southeast Asia “to build up our own connections so we know how to reach the good students,” Lai, at the semiconductor college at NTHU, told Rest of World.
These efforts meant that in 2023–24, nearly a quarter of international students in higher learning in Taiwan were from Vietnam, about 14% from Indonesia, and 9% from Malaysia.
Taiwan’s semiconductor industry faces continued talent shortages, which could affect innovation and production according to experts.
Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times/Redux
Taiwan can benefit from the region’s talent pool, “potentially easing labor shortages and scaling production capabilities,” said Wang at Counterpoint Research. “In return, these Southeast Asian countries could benefit from technology transfer, increased employment opportunities, and the upskilling of their workforce.”
For instance, students from Malaysia have a long history of going to Taiwan for higher studies, and more of them have been staying on to work in its semiconductor manufacturing and engineering sectors, Eddie Chai, secretary of the Federation of Alumni Association of Taiwan Universities, Malaysia, told Rest of World.
“The Taiwan government has loosened the work permit regulations,” and the starting salary for an engineering graduate with a master’s degree is higher in Taiwan, Chai said.
Malaysia is an established player in the back end of the semiconductor industry, with facilities for assembly, testing, and packaging. As the country draws more interest from global chip makers, “the Taiwanese hunt for talent in Malaysia is a positive development,” said Chai. “For both the students and the industry in Malaysia, as some may eventually bring that knowledge back to Malaysia.”
“It’s very hard to compete for jobs because for most companies, you have to speak Mandarin.”
Still, the number of students from Southeast Asia studying for degrees in semiconductor-related fields in Taiwan remains modest. There have been about 120 of them at NYCU over the past three years, or just 2% of all students in this field; at NTHU, about 7% of students pursuing semiconductor-related master’s degrees are from Southeast Asia, and about 2% at the PhD level.
Despite Taiwan’s efforts, the cultural similarity that is a draw can also be a drawback. “Top Vietnamese students prefer to study in the U.S. or Europe over Asia because they want to experience a different culture,” Tran Xuan-Tu, director of the Information Technology Institute at Vietnam National University, told Rest of World.
Language can also be a barrier to securing a job. “It’s very hard to compete for jobs because for most companies, you have to speak Mandarin,” said Le Thi Phuong Thao, a Vietnamese student in her second year of a master’s degree at NYCU.
Thao was a lab engineer at a company making airplane parts in Hanoi when she received a text from her former professors at Vietnam National University’s materials science department where she did her undergraduate degree. They asked her to return for a two-year master’s program in semiconductors on a full scholarship, spending one year in Taiwan.
“I was in a job with no growth prospects. I saw that the [semiconductor] trend is growing, so I signed up,” Thao, 24, told Rest of World. She is taking free Mandarin classes available to international students, and hopes to land a job in Taiwan when she completes her program, or enroll for a PhD.
For Juliano, the Indonesian student, learning Mandarin has paid off: U.S. chip maker Micron, which is stepping up production in Taiwan, made him a job offer this week with “a good salary and bonus,” well before he graduates in February 2025.
Juliano doesn’t plan to return to Indonesia any time soon. “In my country, we don’t have a semiconductor industry,” he said.
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