Behind the layoffs in the industry, the world has set off a war for chip talents

Recently, according to the "Kyodo News", Ishijo Town, Kumamoto Prefecture, held a joint recruitment meeting for semiconductor companies in December last year, and the TSMC Japan Kumamoto Plant (JASM) exhibition area was full, and some job seekers even stood to listen to the lecture. In terms of salary, the starting salary of JASM University graduates is 280,000 yen, which is about 70,000 yen higher than that of manufacturing companies in Kumamoto Prefecture and employees of Kumamoto Prefectural Government.

TSMC's salaries are higher than those in other industries, leading some companies to raise salaries, such as the Higo Bank, the largest regional bank in Kumamoto Prefecture, which raised the salaries of all employees by more than 5% in April, and the starting salaries of college graduates also increased by 20,000 yen to 240,000 yen.

In addition, the war for AI talent in the United States is also escalating. According to a set of "hottest top 5 jobs" salary data, AI/machine learning engineers: the highest annual salary is $300,000; Cloud Security Leader: Up to $300,000 per year; AI Product Manager/Engineering Manager: Up to $650,000 per year; AI Operations Executive: The highest annual salary is $2 million.

With the global AI-driven semiconductor industry boom, the war for talent is intensifying. The treatment of employees has also risen. How to compete for and cultivate talents has become a hot topic in the industry.

01

The current situation of China's chip talent training

Ten years of trees, 100 years of people. The cultivation of talents is a long-term project. In response to the urgent needs of the country, in recent years, many integrated circuit colleges have been established in various places.

In 2003, the mainland set up the major of "integrated circuit design and integrated system", which was adjusted to a special major in 2012. In July 2020, the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council and the Ministry of Education issued a clear notice to set up a first-level discipline of integrated circuits. Subsequently, colleges and universities in many places across the country actively responded to the national strategic needs under the new situation and successively established integrated circuit related colleges.

As of May 2022, the mainland has established a national integrated circuit talent training base, a national demonstration microelectronics college, and an integrated circuit industry-education integration innovation platform for 29 universities, including 23 of the 985 universities.

In 2021, Sun Yat-sen University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Tsinghua University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Peking University and other universities have successively established integrated circuit colleges.

In the field of integrated circuits, China still needs to deepen its basic theories. The establishment of integrated circuit-related majors and colleges will undoubtedly be conducive to the reserve of China's new strength, and will also promote the coordinated development of China's industry, university and research. However, according to the data of the "White Paper on Talents in China's Integrated Circuit Industry", there is still a gap of more than 200,000 talents related to integrated circuits.

Attracted by high salaries and career prospects, chip engineers have become a sweet spot for a while, and the chip industry has become a popular track for job seekers to pay attention to.

In such a situation, in addition to the integrated circuit college, the chip training industry has risen suddenly, and a large number of students have poured into the training class, wanting to get a "ticket" to the chip industry.

From the perspective of market development, vocational training in the chip industry started late, but under the promotion of market demand and enterprises, a standardized and large-scale training mechanism has gradually formed.

At present, chip training on the market mainly includes government-led local government integrated circuit talent training bases and commercial training institutions. Chip training is also mainly divided into two categories, one is fixed-point and targeted training for engineers for chip companies; The other type is training for zero-based "whites", recent college graduates, and people who need to change jobs.

For the specific form and content of training, industry insiders said that the current market mainly includes several types of job employment training, college internship training, industry open courses and enterprise training. At the same time, according to the training duration, the training period of 3 months or more is defined as in-depth training.

However, some industry insiders said that the current hot chip training market is mixed, and many training institutions are playing a game of money under the guise of chip technology fever, but they only see the huge profits of the chip industry, and there is no substantive teaching role.

In all kinds of bells and whistles admissions slogans, high-frequency hot words such as "high salary", "zero foundation", and "career change" flashed, constantly stimulating the nerves of potential objects, but in fact, there are unguardable routines everywhere behind it, and the result is that students spend money in vain, waste time, and are almost useless in the end.

In addition to harming the interests and time of students, this unreliable training provider is also constantly eroding the trust of the enterprise.

The popularity of the chip training industry confirms the huge gap of chip talents from the side.

02

Why is there a shortage of people in the chip industry?

As a high-paying profession, the chip industry has always attracted talents, but the industry has always been short of people.

The current shortage of talents in the chip market is, in the final analysis, the sudden development of chip technology, resulting in the supply of personnel unable to keep up.

Xu Liu, vice president of Shanghai R&D of Haowei Group, a leading chip design company in China, once said that the fundamental reason for the shortage of talents in the chip industry is that the chip industry in Chinese mainland started late, mainly relied on imports in the early stage, and the talent reserve was insufficient. The world's top chip talents mainly come from the United States, Japan, Taiwan and other regions where chip technology started early.

The talent shortage is not unique to China. Ye Tianchun, academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences and researcher of the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced that in the early development of integrated circuits, whether it was the United States, Japan, South Korea or even Taiwan, China, talents were dug up and tapped, and there would be such a process. The development of China's chip industry is that the global industry is shifting to China, so the scale of our country's chip industry is expanding rapidly. This also makes the demand for talents in the chip market more urgent.

In addition to the rapid development of the industry, the difficulty in talent training is also a major reason. It is understood that the threshold for chip research and development is very high, with at least a graduate degree or above, and the salary of the position engaged in Shenzhen starts at least 20,000 yuan, and in addition to the performance award every year, the salary level will also increase to a certain extent every year.

Due to the particularity of the industry, the technical threshold of integrated circuits is high, spanning physics, chemistry, materials, chemical engineering and other disciplines, and the accumulation of talents is inseparable from design to production. The training cycle of chip talents is long, and the technology iteration is fast, resulting in a shortage of talents in the market. As long as the talent is willing to move, every company can give a very high salary. In addition, enterprise recruitment often requires mature talents, and even requires tape-out experience, which also leads to the difficulty of forming a social training mechanism and the high cost of talent training.

Brain drain is also another important reason for the shortage of chip talents in the mainland. According to industry insiders, a large number of outstanding talents in the chip industry have flowed into fields such as finance, Internet and real estate, and even abroad. Talent is looking for higher career returns, which makes the development of the chip industry difficult.

According to the data of the "White Paper on Talents in China's Integrated Circuit Industry (2019-2020 Edition)" compiled by the China Electronic Information Industry Development Research Institute and the China Semiconductor Industry Association, the voluntary turnover rate of the integrated circuit industry in mainland China in 2019 was 12.51%, a decrease of 1.84% from 2018, but still higher than the healthy turnover rate of 5%~10%. Among them, the design industry has the lowest voluntary turnover rate of 10.84%, but it increased by 1.01% over the same period in 2018.

Some of these talents have gone to developed countries such as the United States. In 2020, the U.S. semiconductor industry supported 1.85 million jobs and employed more than 277,000 people in R&D, design, and manufacturing. The U.S. semiconductor industry employs a higher percentage of non-white workers than other industries in the U.S., with 52 percent being white, Asians 28 percent, and blacks 4 percent.

03

The flip side of the shortage is layoffs

The flip side of the industry's talent shortage is layoffs.

One of the main reasons for the layoffs is the wave of industry closures. According to media reports, in 2023, 10,900 chip-related enterprises in China will be cancelled or revoked, an increase of 69.8% year-on-year, and an increase of 89.7% from 5,746 in 2022; In the same period, 65,700 chip-related enterprises were newly registered, an increase of 9.5% year-on-year. This figure also means that in 2023, on average, more than 30 chip-related companies will cancel or revoke their industrial and commercial information every day.

For example, last year, Liu Jun, CEO of Zheku, announced the company's decision that even many directors did not know - "after careful discussion, the company decided to shut down Zheku and terminate the chip self-development business". At this point, the 3,000-person team was disbanded on the spot.

It is understood that many chip companies were established around 2020 and recruited in large quantities with high salaries with the help of venture capital. But as the funds ran out, chip companies went bankrupt, which also contributed to the wave of layoffs. After the tide recedes, it is only known who is "swimming naked".

On the other hand, trade wars and technology wars superimpose industry cycles, resulting in supply disruptions and reduced orders.

China is not only the world's largest importer of semiconductors, but also has an accelerating share of markets such as new energy vehicles, where the demand for semiconductor chips is very strong. Under the US sanctions on China's chips, in addition to the serious blow to China's chip industry, many foreign companies that have been deeply involved in the Chinese market have also suffered losses.

In the early days of chip export controls on China, the U.S. added Chinese companies to the Entity List, resulting in many U.S. suppliers being unable to provide sales and services to Chinese companies.

In addition, in recent years, the consumer electronics industry on the downstream demand side has not made any qualitative leaps in recent years, and users' willingness to upgrade electronic products is generally weak, which has affected the demand for the chip market.

As a result, in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, enterprises continue to start layoff plans.

04

The overall demand for talent is growing

Although some positions are laid off and salaries are reduced, some positions are recruited and salary increases. But overall, the industry is growing rapidly, and the demand for talent is growing. Behind this is the flow of talents, the rise and fall of the industry.

First of all, talents are gradually gathering in leading enterprises. Although Taiwan's semiconductor industry is the world's leader, there is also a huge talent gap, and the demand for talent continues to rise. This is also the reason for TSMC's high-paying recruitment. With the help of strong financial and material resources, leading enterprises can recruit talents more effectively, so that talents can gradually gather.

Second, talent is gradually flowing into in-demand jobs. It is understood that the main key positions with the largest gap in upstream IC design talents: digital IC design engineers, software design engineers, analog IC design engineers, firmware design engineers and other high-level R&D talents, among them, firmware design engineers, the annual increase in the number of demand is larger, reaching 68.6%.

The demand for midstream IC manufacturing and downstream packaging and testing talents is similar to that of previous years, and the demand is mostly for production processes, equipment, operators and other related talents. In addition, the demand for firmware design engineers in midstream IC manufacturing has also continued to increase recently, with an annual growth rate of 125.2% in the first quarter of 2022, making it one of the top five positions in the IC manufacturing industry.

In recent years, due to the popularity of artificial intelligence, related positions have also continued to trigger high-paying recruitment.

Finally, talent is gradually moving to popular regions. The semiconductor industry has a strong regional nature of industrial clusters. In popular areas, it is easy for companies to recruit talent, and it is easy for talent to get high salaries. This has further intensified the flow of talents to industrial clusters.

Judging from the regional map of the integrated circuit industry in the mainland, four major agglomeration areas have been formed, namely the Yangtze River Delta region with Shanghai as the core, the Bohai Rim region with Beijing as the core, the Pan-Pearl River Delta region with Shenzhen as the core, and the central and western regions represented by Wuhan and Xi'an.

The Yangtze River Delta region is the main integrated circuit design and manufacturing base in China, and occupies an important position in the domestic integrated circuit industry.

The design and manufacture of integrated circuits in the Bohai Rim region is relatively developed, but there are differences in policies and infrastructure in the Bohai Rim region, and the coordinated development between regions is relatively slow.

The Pan-Pearl River Delta region is in a leading position in integrated circuit design, among which there are more design representative enterprises in Shenzhen, Zhuhai and other cities, but the industrial development in the Pan-Pearl River Delta region is more unbalanced and obvious.

Relying on the advantages of good universities and the support of industrial policies, the central and western regions have gradually formed characteristic clusters of integrated circuits in the central and western regions.

According to the forecast of the China Semiconductor Association, in recent years, the supply of chip professionals in China has been insufficient, and by 2025, this talent gap will expand to 300,000. On the whole, the industry has a shortage of domestic chip talents, a scarcity of high-end chip talents, and it is not easy for enterprises to recruit people. In addition to cultivating talents, how to attract and retain talents has become the top priority and top priority for the development of China's semiconductor industry.