The Engineers a Semiconductor Factory Cannot Train in a Classroom

Vietnam's semiconductor ambitions are often expressed in numbers.

By 2030, the country aims to train at least 50,000 people with university-level qualifications for the semiconductor industry. Of these, 35,000 are intended for manufacturing, packaging, testing and related parts of the value chain. The national strategy also targets at least one semiconductor fabrication plant and ten packaging and testing plants by 2030.

Those are important numbers.

But for a factory, the number of people who have studied semiconductors is only the beginning.

Consider a Process Engineer in a semiconductor operation.

The job may involve monitoring process data, identifying abnormal variation, investigating an excursion, working with equipment and integration engineers, designing experiments, finding a root cause and determining whether a corrective action has actually improved yield. TSMC's current engineering roles describe the work in almost exactly these terms: data analysis, process control, systematic problem-solving, troubleshooting, yield improvement and continuous improvement on the production line.

This is a very different definition of experience.

A person can understand semiconductor physics without having spent years deciding what to do when a process suddenly stops behaving as expected.

And that distinction matters for Vietnam.

A Process Engineer is not simply an engineer who studied semiconductors

The title sounds familiar.

The work is not.

At an advanced semiconductor manufacturer, a Process Engineer may own a particular process module such as etch, lithography, deposition, diffusion, wet clean or chemical-mechanical planarization. The engineer is expected to keep the process stable, understand variation and respond when the process moves away from its intended window. TSMC describes the role as requiring statistical process control, design of experiments, hands-on participation and frequent presence in the fab.

The interesting part is what happens when the process fails.

A production problem rarely arrives labelled with its answer.

• A parameter moves.
• A defect appears.
• Yield falls.
• A tool begins behaving differently.
• Several variables change at once.

The engineer has to decide which signal matters, which hypothesis is worth testing, which team needs to be involved and whether the evidence is strong enough to change the process.

That is not simply knowledge.

It is accumulated judgment.

The difference becomes clearer at senior levels. TSMC's principal process engineering roles explicitly describe responsibility for minimizing process variations and excursions, maximizing wafer yield and troubleshooting complex problems to their root causes.

This is the kind of experience that is difficult to compress into a university curriculum.

Vietnam is not starting from zero

It would be wrong to describe Vietnam as a country that is only now discovering semiconductor manufacturing.

Intel established its Vietnam operation in 2006. In a 2025 description of the site, Intel said its Vietnam facility had grown to around 6,000 high-tech positions and had become the largest Assembly and Test Manufacturing facility in Intel's network. The site, which began with FCBGA7, now manufactures a much broader range of Intel products.

Amkor adds another layer.

Its Bac Ninh campus began with a planned investment of $1.6 billion for its first two phases and was designed for advanced System-in-Package and memory production, with capabilities spanning packaging and electrical test.

Amkor reported that the Vietnam facility successfully ramped in 2024. In 2025, the company described Vietnam as an important location for transferring SiP production from Korea and said it was continuing to scale the operation. In its 2026 reporting, Amkor again described the ongoing migration of SiP products from Korea to Vietnam and further expansion of the Vietnam site.

Hana Micron has also been expanding its packaging and testing operations in Vietnam.

So the more useful question is not:

Does Vietnam have semiconductor manufacturing experience?

It does.

The better question is:

What kind of experience is being accumulated?

Manufacturing is not one thing

This distinction is easy to lose when “semiconductor manufacturing” is treated as a single industry.

Wafer fabrication, assembly, packaging and testing are connected, but the work performed by engineers inside them is not interchangeable.

An engineer working on advanced packaging is solving a different class of problems from an engineer responsible for a wafer-fabrication process such as lithography or etch.

That does not make one experience inherently more valuable than another.

It means the experience has a specific shape.

Vietnam's current semiconductor development is heavily weighted toward packaging and testing. The government's strategy explicitly calls for developing capabilities across the semiconductor value chain while initially leveraging FDI and Vietnam's existing strengths; the first phase targets ten packaging and testing plants and one small-scale chip fabrication plant by 2030.

That matters when we talk about talent.

A country may have thousands of engineers working in semiconductor-related manufacturing and still have a much smaller pool of people with experience in a particular process, technology, product or stage of factory maturity.

The title does not tell us which one.

The experience problem becomes clearer during a ramp

A new factory creates a particular kind of demand.

It does not simply need people to operate equipment once the production line is stable.

It needs people who can help make the line stable.

Amkor's recent reporting offers a useful example. The company described the Vietnam operation as being in an accelerated transition and ramp-up phase, with an initial emphasis on operational performance rather than simply cost efficiency. It has also been moving SiP production from Korea to Vietnam.

A ramp creates engineering work that cannot be reduced to headcount.

• Processes have to be qualified.
• Equipment has to perform consistently.
• Products have to be transferred.
• Variation has to be understood.
• Defects have to be traced.
• Yield has to improve.

And the people doing that work are building something that did not previously exist in the same form at that site.

This is where experience compounds.

An engineer who has lived through one ramp has a different reference point from an engineer who has only operated a mature production process.

An engineer who has solved several different excursions has a different pattern-recognition ability from someone who has mainly followed established procedures.

The difference may not appear in a CV.

It appears when something goes wrong.

This does not mean fresh graduates are the problem

There is an important counterargument.

Semiconductor companies do not need every engineer to arrive with ten years of fab experience.

TSMC, for example, recruits early-career engineers and interns into roles involving process analysis, yield issues, troubleshooting and collaboration with more experienced teams. Its current internship and engineering descriptions show that fresh talent can enter the manufacturing system and develop through real production work.

That is encouraging for Vietnam.

The objective should not be to create a market in which every semiconductor engineer is an experienced hire.

It should be to create a system in which engineers can become experienced engineers.

And that requires factories.

Not just classrooms.

The real question is how experience compounds

Vietnam's national semiconductor workforce programme is therefore asking two different questions, even if they are often discussed as one.

How many people can Vietnam train?

How many of those people can accumulate the experience required to solve increasingly difficult manufacturing problems?

The first can be measured through enrolment, graduation and qualification.

The second is harder.

• It depends on factories opening.
• It depends on technology being transferred.
• It depends on engineers being given ownership rather than only execution.
• It depends on experienced technical leaders being present to teach the next generation.
• It depends on whether engineers can move from monitoring a process to understanding it, from following an escalation path to leading one, and eventually from solving today's problem to preventing tomorrow's.

This is why the government's own workforce programme goes beyond simply setting a headline number. It calls for 50,000 university-level personnel by 2030 and specifically allocates 35,000 to manufacturing, packaging, testing and related areas.

The number is necessary.

It is not sufficient.

What should a semiconductor engineer's experience actually mean?

For a hiring manager, this changes the question.

Instead of asking: “Does this person have semiconductor experience?”, it may be more useful to ask: “What semiconductor problem has this person actually learned to solve?”

• Which process did they own?
• What kind of variation did they investigate?
• Did they work on yield?
• Did they participate in a ramp?
• Did they transfer a process from another site?
• When a process went out of control, did they identify the cause, or did they execute someone else's corrective action?
• How much of the result belonged to them?

These distinctions are particularly important in a young manufacturing ecosystem.

A CV can tell you that someone was a Process Engineer. It rarely tells you what happened on the day the process stopped behaving normally.

That is where the real difference between people often begins.

Vietnam's semiconductor challenge may therefore be less about producing engineers than producing experience

Vietnam has made a significant commitment to semiconductor manufacturing and talent.

The country already has established assembly and test operations, rapidly expanding packaging capacity and a national strategy that aims to move further into the value chain. New investments continue to add production capacity. In January 2026, FPT also announced an advanced packaging and testing plant intended to create additional opportunities for practical semiconductor training in Vietnam.

The next stage will be less visible than the investment announcements.

It will happen inside the factories.

It will be measured in the engineers who have learned to recognise a process excursion before it becomes a production problem; who know which variables to question; who have seen a failed experiment and know what it taught them; who can explain why a corrective action worked; and who can teach another engineer to do the same.

A semiconductor ecosystem becomes deeper not simply when it has more engineers.

It becomes deeper when more engineers have spent enough time solving the problems that only a working factory can teach.

That may be the experience Vietnam needs to build next.