This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Before Dang Nhut Hao came to Taiwan, he knew nothing about semiconductors.
Growing up in Dong Thap – a southern Vietnamese province on the Mekong Delta famous for its rice fields, red-headed cranes and lakes dotted with lotuses – Dang loved biology, and got into one of Ho Chi Minh City’s most prestigious undergraduate science programmes in 2019. But his family couldn’t afford the tuition. At the age of 18, Dang took out a loan of 80,000 New Taiwan dollars ($2,450) and flew to Taipei to join a semiconductor and electro-optical engineering work-study programme.
“Although the cost of living and tuition here are higher than in Vietnam, I could earn money on my own, pay for everything myself, and support myself,” Dang, who has since graduated, told Rest of World.
Dang is among thousands of teenagers from Southeast Asia who have been recruited into work-study programmes since 2017, and ended up in factory jobs in Taiwan’s booming semiconductor sector. The tiny island supplies 63% of the world’s semiconductors – chips that power everything from LED bulbs to smartphones, electric cars, and artificial intelligence models. The industry is growing rapidly, with revenue expected to hit $1 trillion by 2030 from $545 billion in 2023, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report.
This has created a massive, often unfilled, demand in Taiwan for workers in its semiconductor fabricators, or fabs. There were 26,000 monthly job openings in the latter half of 2024, mostly in lower-level positions such as machine operators and packaging workers, according to Taiwanese recruitment firm 104 Job Bank.
One way to fill this gap has been by recruiting middle- and high-school graduates, largely from Southeast Asia, into Taiwan’s vocational high schools and colleges. Some 35,924 students were recruited into these programmes – in all fields including STEM – in the five years to 2022, according to the latest data available from the Ministry of Education and the Overseas Community Affairs Council.
Students in these programmes often become a low-paid labour force, working long hours in factories in the guise of “practical training”, according to education experts and a recent report from Control Yuan, a government agency that acts as a watchdog. Some schools intentionally leave gaps in schedules for students to work, blurring the lines between work-study and part-time labour, the report said.
After graduation, students can find it difficult to move from the shop floor to higher-skilled engineering positions without further education, Ping Chou, chairperson of the Taiwan Higher Education Union and a sociology professor at Nanhua University, told Rest of World.
“The time spent in school is very, very little – sometimes less than two days a week, or in some cases, just one day or less,” he said. “What’s the reality? Most of their time is spent working.”
The Association of Private Universities and Colleges, and the Association of National Universities of Science and Technology of Taiwan – which represent vocational institutes – did not respond to a request for comment.
Dang arrived in Taiwan under an industry-academia programme, part of a 2016 initiative by then-President Tsai Ing-wen to reduce reliance on China and boost ties with neighbors.
He enrolled at Minghsin University of Science and Technology, one of Taiwan’s largest technical colleges in the electronics hub of Hsinchu, for a four-year bachelor’s degree. In his first year, he mostly learned Mandarin, he said. In his second year, he and 31 classmates were bussed to Miaoli, a small county south of Hsinchu. At an LED factory owned by Everlight Electronics, Dang was taught to operate five machines that cut and packaged semiconductor chips used in LEDs.
Such internships fill a critical need in the semiconductor industry, where production lines run 24/7 and cannot be shut down, Weber Chung, senior vice president at 104 Job Bank, told Rest of World.
Operators work in shifts to monitor production, calibrate machines, and troubleshoot problems as they arise, he said. When a machine malfunctions, they refer to technical manuals to diagnose and repair the problem. It is precise work because modern chips operate at the nano scale, and even the smallest defect can cause failure, he said.
Dang learned this trade working six days a week and living in a factory dorm. He was paid the then-minimum monthly wage of 23,800 New Taiwan dollars ($724), equal to an entry-level salary for operators, and the money went toward his tuition and student loan, he said.
He spent his third year back on campus. In his fourth year, he returned to the factory to maintain the machines.
“In university, if we’re talking about truly learning technical or scientific skills, we didn’t really get to learn much due to time constraints,” Dang, now 23, recalled. “Since we were either in class or at work, there wasn’t really time to study properly. Most of the time, classes were brief, just enough to complete assignments, and then we had to go back to work.”
Minghsin University recruits around 2,600 international students each year. More than 60% come through industry-academia collaboration programmes, Hsin-Te Liao, vice president of the university, told Rest of World. Most are from Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia, he said.
“We recruit foreign students based on the needs of the companies we work with,” he said.
Companies mostly request students from Vietnam and the Philippines, according to Liao. After the students graduate, the companies hope to retain them as employees.
Among the companies partnering with vocational schools are ASE Holdings, Powertech Technology, and Siliconware Precision Industries, according to recruitment documents. They are part of the supply chain for big tech firms including Nvidia and Apple.
Dang said some of his classmates remain at Everlight as maintenance workers or forepersons. Others have found jobs as operators in the electronics industry, he said. A few have returned to their home countries.
Dang was one of five students who decided to study further.
Everlight did not respond to a request for comment. The Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association, and the Taiwan IC Industry & Academia Research Alliance – which represent the semiconductor industry – also did not respond.
The inflow of students into Taiwan is set to increase as the government has announced plans to invest $160 million to attract 320,000 students into STEM, finance, and semiconductor fields by 2030.
Middle-school graduates, some as young as 15, are recruited through a “3+4 Vocational Education Program”.
These include Ryan Hartono, who left Medan, Indonesia, when he was 16 as part of the programme to attend three years of vocational high school, followed by a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering at Cheng Shiu University in Kaohsiung. Every three months, Hartono found himself in a fab in southern Taiwan, gripping a digital measuring tool no larger than an iPhone, he told Rest of World.
Hartono’s tasks revolved around the manufacturing lines of Walsin Technology Corporation. The company makes semiconductor passive components that are installed in Intel’s computer processors and AI servers for Microsoft and Google, among others.
Hartono would measure multilayer ceramic capacitors and chip resistors no bigger than a few centimeters, ensuring they met the exacting standards set by designers and engineers. He also operated the machines that made these components, he said.
“It is more of a one-sided, simple job,” Hartono, now 25, recalled.
At college, Hartono worked five days in the same factory with two days of rest – the only time he could study, he said. Most of his classmates graduated to low-skilled jobs as operators in electronics factories and fabs, he said.
Such work-study programmes place students at a disadvantage for engineering jobs, Shangmao Chen, a government-sponsored curriculum reviewer of vocational institutes and a professor at Fo Guang University, told Rest of World.
“Most of their internship work is quite low-level, to be honest. It’s basically operator-level work,” he said. “So, after graduation, I think it’s highly unlikely for these students to have any opportunity to advance to the position of an engineer.”
Both Cheng Shiu and Minghsin universities did not respond to a request for comment about whether their programmes blur the lines between internship and labor.
After graduation, Hartono was hired as a low-level engineer at Yageo Corporation, a supplier of components of chips used to train AI. He later moved to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, where he dons a bunny suit every morning to maintain ion implant machines that give semiconductors their electrical characteristics.
Other than his usual hours, he also works one weekend a month and a week-long night shift every two months. Shift work is common in maintenance and operation roles, which are usually filled by vocational school graduates, said Chung from 104 Job Bank. Hartono said he is happy with his job, and isn’t thinking of more advanced research and design roles.
“It hasn’t been long since I joined, and I feel that my role is to first understand my work well, and contribute to the department in some way,” he said.
Dang aspires to do higher-skilled semiconductor research and has gone back to his alma mater to get a master’s degree. He would like to work in Taiwan for at least three years before potentially returning home to Vietnam.
He does not regret choosing to do the work-study programme, he said. It has opened up new opportunities, including joining a master’s program in semiconductor engineering and a part-time research internship.
“I think I am very lucky, I was able to transition into the semiconductor field,” he said.
Hsiuwen Liu is a Labor x Tech reporter based in Taipei, Taiwan.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
