SHANGHAI, March 29 Reuters China is ramping up efforts to develop homegrown semiconductor talent as it seeks to rapidly fill a shortage of expertise that has been made worse by U.S. efforts to limit Beijing39;s access to advanced chip technology.

Enrolments for undergraduate and postgraduate courses have surged over the past five years thanks to new funds for top universities as well as a boom in smaller private schools focused on shorterterm instruction.

Some graduates with degrees in other subjects are being lured into the growth industry at a time when entrylevel salaries have doubled.

The prospect of the chip industry is promising, while the employment for software engineers from ordinary schools is not as good as before, said Clara Zhao, who studied materials science at university before securing a job in the chips sector.

China faces a shortage of an estimated 200,000 industry workers this year, according to a white paper jointly published by the China Center for Information Industry Development, a government think tank, and the China Semiconductor Industry Association CSIA, a trade group.

Closing that gap is growing even more critical as the U.S. looks to cut China off from global supply chains, citing fears that any advanced chips it makes will be ultimately used by China39;s military.

China needs to prioritise training talent even over seeking immediate solutions to its supplychain issues, Liu Zhongfan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told…