What can Europe do to attract and retain chip workforce?
By 2030, roughly 114,000 people working in European microelectronics will retire, while the number of new graduates entering the field is growing by just 1% a year. Moreover, 1 in 4 of today’s technical workers already plan to leave their job within the next three years.
The European Chips Diversity Alliance (ECDA) has just published its latest report, Retaining Technical Talent in the European Semiconductor Sector: a study on why technical workers in Europe’s chip industry stay, or leave. It’s based on a survey of 220 technical workers across 15 European countries, alongside interviews with HR professionals and national sector bodies in four Member States.
Key findings include:
- Why fairness, not pay, is the strongest predictor of who leaves
- Why younger workers are leaving at double the rate of Gen X
- What separates the organisations people stay with from the ones they leave
- Nine practical recommendations for organisations and policymakers
Why this matters for policy
Europe’s semiconductor ambitions, from the European Chips Act to the newly proposed Chips Act 2.0, depend on a workforce that’s already stretched thin. The report finds that the sector’s retention problem isn’t primarily about pay: workers who see career progression as unfairly handled are 2.3 times more likely to be planning to leave, regardless of salary. Younger workers, in particular, are leaving at roughly double the rate of their older colleagues. Their conditions are worse, but rather they’re looking for faster technical growth than they’re currently offered.
The report sets out nine concrete recommendations, three of them aimed directly at policymakers and sector bodies, including extending pay transparency guidance to cover career progression frameworks, and treating EU-level skills programmes as retention infrastructure, not just recruitment.
Read the policy brief:
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