Securing the next generation of STEM talent with ASML

In today’s episode, we explore how ASML, one of the world’s leading technology companies, builds powerful, long-term partnerships with universities to tackle the shortage of STEM talent in the semiconductor industry.

Our guest, Wesley Crock, Global Manager of University Relations at ASML, shares how the company takes a strategic, ecosystem-wide approach to collaborating with universities.

Whether you work in academia, industry or policy, this conversation will inspire you to rethink how partnerships can help address critical talent and innovation challenges.

You can listen to the full interview in our podcast:

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Transcript

Sarah Jaber:

Today, I am really happy to feature Wesley Crock, who is the Global Manager of University Relations at ASML. I can try to introduce ASML myself but maybe I will leave that to you, Wesley.

I just want to say that ASML is a really great example of a company that is dedicated to collaboration with universities, and we have been working very closely over the last few years. ASML is part of our business group, which is a community that we provide for large R&D intensive companies that see the purpose and want to learn more about collaboration with universities. So, Wesley, it has been a pleasure working with you and it is great to have you with us today.

As I mentioned, Wesley is the Global Manager of University Relations. He has a background in environmental science and has helped shape large scale programs, connecting academia, industry and policy. From pioneering initiatives at EIT, which is where we first got to know each other actually, through to his current role at ASML, Wesley bridges, sectors and scales to foster talent development, research, and systemic change across Europe’s knowledge and innovation ecosystems.

Thank you, Wesley, and welcome. So, ASML, at least what I know, is the company that makes the machines that make the chips which we use in our devices. Is that correct?

Wesley Crock:

It is spot on. We make these big complex machines which comprise 100,000 components that companies like Intel and Samsung purchase to actually fabricate the chips. That is right.

Sarah Jaber:

So, it is a major player in the semiconductor industry, and I think most people would be aware that, across the semiconductor industry, there is quite a critical shortage of talent and therefore talent acquisition and training the next generation for the needs is really important.

Starting with that, I would like to ask you a little bit around ASML’s approach to investing in university relations and partnerships.

What has been your approach and what has been the role of this talent shortage in shaping how you engage with universities?

Wesley Crock:

As economies digitise and societies reindustrialize, and if we also take into consideration the boundary conditions that we are faced with, like aging populations, demographic change… that is also not, I think, supporting a replenishment of talent.

Looking forward to the next five to ten years, the so-called gray wave that will be coming, so really the retirement wave of the baby boomer generation, what we really see is that there is a threat, there is a danger. We have quantified and characterised it, we know exactly, or we have a ballpark, range of what the demand will be for STEM talent, which is the talent that we are looking for in the semiconductor ecosystem.

Also, the education level. So, understanding what different ideas STEM comprises. So, it is engineering, mathematics, physics… and then there are all kinds of specialisations. And we, as ASML, are not the only company that is going to be having an increased appetite for such talent, but it is competitors. It is also our partners, suppliers, and customers who we also need to have access to these talents.

We take really an ecosystem perspective. This is not just about us as a company, but it is about looking at the entire ecosystem and ensuring that we can really, together and jointly, tackle this issue.

So that is, I think, a first departing point that is essential to understand. For us internally at ASML, it has really been imperative, if we want real systemic change to happen and not a box of tricks. But really having it embedded in our DNA is to ensure that we are good at telling our senior leaders and articulating to them the threats of this particular STEM talent issue.

So, one of the first steps has been doing our internal work and ensuring that senior leaders understand this issue.

And then, this involves making decisions. There are more than 4,000 universities in Europe and we can’t engage with every one of them. So, it is also important that we have some kind of framework or evidence-based methodology in place to help us determine with whom we should engage while ensuring that we can really have some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement in place. So, we need to ensure that all parties are benefiting ultimately in the end.

Sarah Jaber:

It is interesting that you used the word threat. There is a very strong imperative for you to be collaborating with universities. Often, we talk about the importance of starting with a clear goal, a clear motivation as to why you do it. So, I think in your case it is very valid and clear.

I would love to hear more about this. You mentioned a framework for decision making. How do you decide who to work with? As you said, there is plenty of universities around, so how do you make that decision? Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the process.

Wesley Crock:

Sure. So, for us, it is really key to have some kind of evidence-based framework to help us make these decisions. We have our own in-house assessment framework. We call it our tiering framework. So, we actually bucket educational institutions into different tiers based on the potential that they can bring with a view to talent.

Also, something really critical to mention is that, of course, research and innovation are at the heart of our company, but this particular framework is really dedicated to talent. There is a broad variety of indicators that we use to carry out our fact finding, our investigation.

The most important ones are the actual enrolments of students in the fields of study that are most critical to us. Critical meaning those fields of study that have, and will have, the highest labour market tension, so the mismatch in supply and demand. And, for us, that is the STEM sciences.

So, the first step is to really quantify as much as possible. And this is really a big effort because of the decentralisation of this type of data. But really understanding the number of enrolled students in particular education institutions is one key indicator.

Another one is looking at hiring history. So, looking at what the actual past hiring relationship looks like with those institutions. This is really a key predictive indicator.

It cannot be underemphasised the role of proximity. Although the university talent is mobile and international, we do see that proximity does play a role, and in particular with the different types of education levels. So, with universities of applied science, the proximity plays quite a key role, and once you get to VET and more vocational talent, it even plays a more significant role. So, proximity is a factor that we cannot ignore.

Another one would be looking at the quality of the institution, so looking at rankings, but also at the propensity of the university to collaborate with industry. What we have done is we have looked which associations those universities are members of, to show how open and internationalised they are. This is also quite key for us.

Also, one indicator or criteria that cannot be underestimated is the likelihood of graduates to move from a particular country or education institution to the Netherlands, where our headquarters are located. We may have a lot of highly educated large volumes of STEM talent in a particular country or university, but if they are not moving for various reasons, then this influences our frame our engagement strategy.

So collectively, we carry out a big assessment. We collect lots of information from various different sources, and ultimately, we plug this into some kind of calculator that we have created, and we get an actual score per university or per education institution.

And through qualitative discussions with our business, with other stakeholders in HR and TA, and in our senior management, we then come to a decision where we decide which institutions fall on tier one, tier two and tier three.

So, this is the framework behind that. And then, of course, how we service or how the engagement looks like will also vary from tier to tier.

Sarah Jaber:

Thanks for sharing that. It sounds quite scientific, which I would expect from a company full of scientists. I can imagine this isn’t something you developed overnight, or in a short period. It has probably been iterating over, I would say, years.

Could you tell us a bit around the pathway?

Wesley Crock:

Firstly, it takes time, because one really has to determine which indicators are most important and how actually granular you want to be. So, how important is it for it to be as robust as possible while ensuring that there are the resources in place to actually make that investment?

I would already say that if a company or an organisation doesn’t have a university relations strategy or even function in place, asking these questions is already a starting point. So, already questioning with whom we engage and what is important for us is already a first step, but I can say that it takes years, and we are constantly reevaluating the tiering framework, so what we use to evaluate keeps getting better.

I also think what is really important is we shouldn’t carry this out every year. It takes time for the fruits of the engagement strategies of the  collaborations with these institutions to actually materialise. So, one also has to be patient, sit back and trust the process and then at a certain moment in time decide to change directions or continue the same path.

Sarah Jaber:

I would assume this would be more for proactive outreach to universities, to then identify which one to approach. Or is it also something you would use as an assessment tool if you got requests coming in?

Wesley Crock:

That is a good question. So, for us, tier one includes those universities that are really the highest impact, as well as those with whom we realise that there is really a mutual desire to partner. Based on this, we invest proactive resources, so we are proactively engaging. It is really a one-on-one intense account management, where we are aiming for a meaningful and genuine partnership.

We meet quarterly, for example, with the account managers appointed in those organisations and we usually have access directly to the senior, most academic and administrative leaders in those organisations, such as rector and presidents, where  we identify in a dedicated way what our shared goals are and where is the overlap.

That is really where the heart of the partnership is, in these overlapping objectives, and ensuring that we don’t stop when identifying those, but then we also breathe life into it.

And that means co-creating initiatives, co-creating programs, doing things together to actually bring the people in our business together with the academic leaders in the education institutions. One important thing I would really like to highlight is that I can have my institutional account manager, but they are not actually sitting in the faculties. By co-creating these programs and initiatives together, that then is the impetus to mobilise and bring the subject matter experts together.

Sarah Jaber:

Exactly. I would love to hear a little bit more around what this means in practice.

You talked about what you could potentially do together with the tier one institutions, the ones that you really have this partnership with

What are some examples of activities with other types of organisations, that you collaborate on a lesser extent?

Wesley Crock:

With tier one, it is more proactive, but it is also reactive, such as requests that we get on guest lecturing…, where we are happy to then provide an input for.

For tiers two and three, it is also employer branding. So, we have a big employer branding department, which is really digital advertisements, that supports student associations in those universities, participates in the recruitment fairs, has campus promoters on-site to answer questions about ASML to any students that may have, and to tell how it is like to work at ASML.

That is really responding to requests with tier two and three. They know who to contact in ASML, which is, for example, me. They say, “Hey, I am having a course in electrical engineering and power electronics, and we would love to have a 45-minute guest lecture on this topic. Can you send me someone on this date and this time to do a virtual face-to-face?”

And it is just responding to these types of requests, but it also ranges from guest lecturing to more impactful activities, like curriculum advising. Usually now, we really see industrial advisory boards taking off. So, it has been on-request sitting and responding and articulating exactly what our needs are but also having a discussion and dialogue about what that actually means.

So, there is a really a variety of different activities that we offer to our partnering universities; it is what we call it our collaborative package.

Sarah Jaber:

I also wanted to ask you maybe, so you sit in the university relations team or unit is it central in the organisation that you so you really are the, that entry into ASML to then coordinate, which I don’t want to ask a bit around how that works because we talk about universities being very complex and I think companies are also very complex.

I also wanted to ask you about your role and unit. So, you sit in the university relations team. Is it central in the organisation? Are you the entry into ASML to then coordinate the collaborations? I don’t want to ask how that works because we talk about universities being very complex and I think companies are too .

How do you manage that in terms of structure and coordination?

Wesley Crock:

University relations in ASML is functionally in HR, so it is part of our enabling functions due to the relevance of hiring and recruitment in the future. But it is a board topic, so this is really on our executives’ agenda, because of the relevance of this issue to our bottom line.

Within the priority, or within our key universities, there are appointed account managers. When I started, one of my biggest ambitions was to have someone appointed at each tier one university, and that has happened. But that is really at the institutional level, often the president’s office or the strategy office or the corporate relations office.

But at the same time, we are 25,000 people in Veldhoven. We are 40,000 people globally and we are full of incredibly bright and educated engineers who have a very much research-intensive focus. So, they are by nature collaborating with different education institutions, and that is what we want.

We want this organic collaboration to take place. No gatekeeper here. If someone does have a question, they can come to me and they know how to reach me. At the same time, we have many different teams in our R&D and engineering, but across all of our departments, which have as part of their daily work to engage with universities.

Sarah Jaber:

Really interesting. To build on that, you talked about timescales. Industry moves a bit faster than universities, and sometimes partnerships are hard to plan on a longer term, but I know, for example, you have a longstanding partnership with the Technical University of Eindhoven, which I think earlier this year or late last year, got renewed for another several years.

Can you tell us a bit around how that works in terms of that longer term planning or building the relationship to the point that you are confident to say, “Okay, for the next few years, this is what we are going to be doing and how we are going to work together”?

Wesley Crock:

Things take time even with companies, especially when it comes to these types of strategic partnerships, and it is because of the complex nature of the agreement. So, it doesn’t happen overnight.

This is actually what happened with TU Eindhoven, and it has been in the works for decades, but they are in our backyard. They are really eight kilometres away from our headquarters. And I think that, again, this is where proximity really plays a key. We can easily go within 20 minutes and be sitting in a meeting room with our partners at TU Eindhoven.

I think what is really important and what we have learned, and I think that this has been also very helpful for all of our regional sites, is that the partnership should also be, at least for us, driven by the business. Usually, talent is not the driver to concluding or initiating really a strategic agreement between us and an education institution.

And this is also the case with TU Eindhoven. So, the agreement that we concluded last April, which is a 10-year, 80-million-euro partnership agreement with TU Eindhoven, is really driven by research. Then, we are attaching and connecting to this priority in the agreement, from the talent and education perspective.

I think it is important just to acknowledge that by having research and education involved, we are really tackling the two main missions of the university. And I think that is also what makes, especially the TU Eindhoven agreement, so meaningfully symbiotic.

Sarah Jaber:

I can connect that to a question that just came through from the audience around. We are talking a lot about talent, but you just mentioned in the TU Eindhoven example the research element. Do you have anything to add about the research side?

Is that more maybe for the tier one, larger scale collaborations? Or is it a priority?

Wesley Crock:

What we find is that our tiering framework is really talent-driven, but we work very closely with research. So, usually, even when there are strategic visits at a university, it is research and education going together. So, we really do try to tackle this hand in hand.

But of course, the approach to research is a bit different, at least within our organisation. The universities that we collaborate with are more or less the same as those that are in our tiering assessments. So, TU Eindhoven, TU Delft, Twente, ARCNL…, so it is a really the usual suspects that you could expect.

Sarah Jaber:

Certainly. I wanted to ask a bit around impact. It is always a big topic, as you mentioned, and you have invested a lot in this space. You have several staff working on university relations, and you have a few end goals in mind.

How do you track the impact or the outcomes of what you are doing, to then determine how to pivot or keep going?

Wesley Crock:

I think I can answer this maybe with two different answers. The first one, I guess it is not impact, but it is looking at the actual results, so having very clear performance indicators already in place. So, you have these objectives, but what is it that we ultimately want to achieve and what do we need to be able to quantify it?

So, for example, we look at internships, we look at the number of students that enrol in our talent engagement programs. We have a scholarship program where we award 40 scholarships every year. We have a master class for PhD students that is a centrally driven event that we organise also every year.

It is looking to see if the enrolments and selection of students from those universities are increasing, as well as seeing within which fields of study or within which faculties they are coming from. So, that is one thing that we are looking at.

Ultimately, an impact indicator is hires in the end. So, what does the conversion actually look like for those particular universities? And really looking at these data sets and refreshing them every year. We have scorecards per university, which we share with them, and we discuss about the results really openly, especially the ones over the past five years on these particular indicators.

Another impact area would be more on the systemic work that we do together. And I can give the example with Project Beethoven. It is this Dutch strategy to essentially attract, educate and graduate more STEM talent, specifically for the semiconductor ecosystem.

Because of the partnership we have with TU Eindhoven, and other key universities involved, we were able to help shape this initiative and ensure that industry was really at the heart of it. This would not have been possible had we not already established those strong relations with those universities. So, it is also broader, more systemic results in the end.

Sarah Jaber:

That is great to hear and to see that impact is going out beyond just the one-to-one partnerships that you are working on, because you talked earlier about that ecosystem approach and seeing the benefits follow through on to other players.

To build on that a little bit, I am aware we have a few minutes left together, I would like to go back to what you said at the start around that talent shortage it is very much driving the approach. There is this threat, going back to the word you used, and it is probably not going away anytime soon.

How do you see the future of partnerships, especially from ASML’s perspective, evolving over the next, let’s say, 10-15 years? Does it have to increase? Is it fine the way it is? What are your views on how it is going to develop?

Wesley Crock:

I see two key changes that are already starting to happen, but that need to become really more systematic. The first one, and we already see it evolving with universities and education institutions, is to define their role. Is it really just to educate young people? Or do they have a role to play in professional education and inspiring young people to participate in STEM, or in the gender and inclusion discussion around mobilising 50% of the population, for example, to participate in STEM?

So, I see that we need to look in a more comprehensive way at different talent leavers besides just graduates in their twenties. I think we need to really see what the role of a university or of an education institution is.

That is one thing, and I think the second thing is we really need to consider and emphasise the role of policy, and Project Beethoven is a good example. I was just in Brussels yesterday at the European Commission, and I learned that the Pact for Skills, or the Skills Union (now DG EMPL) is merging with DG EAC on this particular topic, and this is exactly what we need. We need labour and market driven education to guide how we are ensuring that graduates are fit for purpose, but also that our societies are obtaining and having access to the brains and the people power that they need.

Sarah Jaber:

Exactly. So, universities, education institutions, companies and government all playing their role.

Wesley Crock:
We need to unite around this threat and around finding really the objectives that we agree on together.

Sarah Jaber:

Great. Thank you. Then final question: Going back to what we talked about with your approach and the framework you have applied and that more systematic approach that you take, would you have any recommendations or insights you could share with other companies or even universities that are looking to implement a similar type of approach?

Wesley Crock:

I would say start by looking in your backyard. Start, do not become paralysed because it is a daunting task. I think already start to do things, start to build connections.

And I think actually, and I am not doing marketing for UIIN, but I think also participating and really engaging with thought leaders and other organisations that have experience with this. There is a lot to learn from this and also for us, from you. So, I think getting connected into this type of space where this type of learning and discussions are taking place is a really good start, and also just start doing things.

Sarah Jaber:

Always a great way to end. Just start doing things. Start and starting small, right? It is something we always talk about.

Wesley, thank you so much. This has been a lovely conversation. A lot of very valuable insights to learn from you. So, thank you again for joining us and thanks to everyone who has tuned in.

You can always find out more about, about our events by going to our website or listening to our podcast series. With that, I thank you all and wish you a pleasant rest of the day.

Wesley Crock:

Thanks, Sarah. Thanks, everyone.

Sarah Jaber:

Thanks, Wesley.

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