NOFO: Semiconductor Industry Skills and Training in the UK

Deadline: 29-Mar-23

UK registered organisations can apply for a share of up to £5 million for initiatives to address shortages across the semiconductor industry for innovative skills, talent, and training projects.

The aim of this competition is to create and deliver course content and materials that will support skills, talent and training across semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain. This is to build awareness of semiconductor manufacturing and application, filling key gaps in the UK’s workforce talent and training capabilities.

Your project must demonstrate:

• Strong industrial links and a well-defined industry focus.
• An understanding and awareness of semiconductor industrial skills that are currently lacking and any future requirements to enable the workforce.
• An innovative, ambitious, and realistic idea to meet a significant semiconductor skills or talent requirement.
• Planning for, and commitment to, creating and maintaining the resource on an ongoing basis for a minimum period of 3 years after the funded project completion.
• That you will provide new training opportunities or skill resources not already available in the UK, a region or for a group of underrepresented people.
• That it has the capacity and capability to be delivered successfully and on time.
• Value for money and evidence a return on investment, in terms of trained, upskilled and reskilled people.

You can:

• Produce content and material for outreach, engagement and learning purposes.
• Conduct semiconductor outreach and engagement exercises to individuals, academia, industry, and other groups.
• Deliver course material or facilitate the running of courses.
• Provide training or incentives for training to specific groups of underrepresented people or in specific training subjects.
• Create STEM ambassador programmes.

Specific themes

• Defining and filling key skills gaps in the UK’s semiconductor manufacturing, research and supply chain workforce.
• Producing industry compatible training programs.
• Promoting skills in design for manufacture and assembly.
• Increasing interaction between academia or training establishments and industry to ensure skills streams for the future, including, apprenticeships, internships or sandwich courses
• Delivering courses or practical training areas for example schools engagement, upskilling and reskilling of existing workforce, technical courses and vocational training, undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing professional development (CPD).
• Improving the quality and capacity of existing training delivery.
• Outreach and engagement material focusing on semiconductors for all ages and levels in academia and industry.
• Supporting and promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion within semiconductor technology training, manufacturing, or research.
• Providing training or incentives for training to specific underrepresented groups of people or in specific training subjects.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total costs must not exceed £500,000.

Eligibility Criteria

• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project or work alone your organisation must:
    • Be a UK registered business of any size, research organisation, research and technology organisation (RTO), academic institution, charity, not-for-profit, or public sector organisation
    • Demonstrate clear industrial support for your application, covering a cross section of technologies and sectors
    • Work in, or have strong industrial ties with the UK semiconductor industry sector
  • More information on the different types of organisation can be found in the Funding rules.
  • If the lead organisation is not a business it must collaborate with at least 1 business of any size.
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • Business of any size.
    • Academic institution.
    • Charity.
    • Not for profit.
    • Public sector organization.
    • Research and technology organisation (RTO).
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into the Innovation Funding Service.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
• Non-funded partners
  • Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
  • Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
  • You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.
  • You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. Innovate UK will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
  • All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
• Number of applications
  • An organisation can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in a further 2 applications across both strands of the competition.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.