How does "lithography giant" cultivate talents? The Human Resources Director of ASML China has revealed these points

The shortage of talent has always been a major issue facing the development of the domestic chip industry. So, how does ASML, the leader of lithography machines, cultivate talents in China? On the afternoon of May 18th, ASML held a talent strategy sharing event in Shanghai. Wang Hongrui, ASML's Director of Human Resources in China, shared the company's experience in talent development.

Wang Hongrui stated that when looking at people, ASML may be different from some companies. ASML emphasizes long-term vision and hopes that employees can continue to learn and improve by doing the work they truly love when they come. New employees are usually studying for the first 8 months of employment. A new engineer needs to be trained for 12-18 months before they can follow company engineers to meet clients.

Image source: Taken by journalist Zhu Chengxiang

How to retain employees and cultivate talents?

So, how does ASML retain employees? Wang Hongrui stated that ASML starts from five aspects, including physical health, mental health, financial health, social health, and career development health.

In terms of mental health, ASML has conducted EAP projects. For example, last year, some colleagues may feel a lot of pressure and it's not easy to talk to their loved ones or children about it. At this point, they can make anonymous phone calls, with a counselor on the other end. Everything is anonymous, and the company only knows how many calls were made this year and from which city, that's all

Wang Hongrui Image source: ASML provided image

Wang Hongrui stated that in terms of talent cultivation, the company emphasizes self motivation. Employees are the owners of self-development, 'not what I push you to do', but 'what you want'. Of course, the company also provides opportunities in this process, which is a two-way journey. Secondly, focus on the overall and long-term perspective, not just for employees to have the skills to do this job.

For example, how to handle conflicts is of course important in work, but in reality, it is also important in the family. It exists no matter where or in any relationship. A healthy relationship without conflict is definitely unhealthy.

Thirdly, looking at 'development', starting from multiple dimensions, we pay more attention to the transferability of employee skills. More focused on providing employees with a relatively long-term competitive advantage than salary.

How to cultivate talents in computational lithography?

ASML not only provides lithography machines, but also has a lithography solution consisting of lithography machines, computational lithography, and electron beam measurement, known as the Iron Triangle. After NVIDIA launched its Computational Lithography products, the concept of Computational Lithography also immediately became popular.

If lithography machine services are more hardware oriented, and computational lithography is more related to computing power and algorithms, what are the differences in cultivating these two types of talents? Regarding a question from a reporter from Daily Economic News, Wang Hongrui said, "Computational lithography is biased towards software, and the training cycle (compared to hardware talents) is actually the same. Because of these things, it is difficult to obtain them in university education. Many things can only be learned through practical experience in enterprises. Even those who have worked at KLA (semiconductor equipment company) have to learn from scratch

Image source: Taken by journalist Zhu Chengxiang

In addition, when communicating with chip design companies, the reporter found that some companies also collaborate with universities to conduct targeted training while students are still in their graduate stage. Regarding this, Wang Hongrui stated: We haven't done this yet, but we really hope to collaborate with universities to do some more interesting explorations. When it comes to education, recruitment is actually quite challenging. Sometimes when we start late, it's too late. We also maintain close cooperation with universities, including scholarship programs, sponsoring competitions, and giving lectures. We hope that students can have close contact with us, ASML technology, and people

Of course, you also know that our size is not as large as some companies, so sometimes we have to balance whether this thing is suitable or not, "Wang Hongrui added.