Standing at a lab bench in a Hillsboro classroom, Omotara Chukwuemeka seems to be wrestling with a torque wrench as she works to tighten a bolt. It slips with each turn, just a bit, but enough to come loose from the bolt.

An instructor looks over and makes a suggestion about keeping the wrench level. Classmates lean in and propose a slight adjustment to how Chukwuemeka is holding the tool. Then there’s a click, the bolt turns and she lights up with a grin.

“I like watching when the light bulbs go off. Somebody picks something up or learns something they didn’t know before, that kind of makes my day,” said Rich Holt, a retired Intel engineering manager overseeing the lessons earlier this month.

He’s helping lead an all-female class of sixteen students participating in Portland Community College’s Quick Start semiconductor training program at its Willow Creek campus. It’s an intensive, two-week program aimed at building a pipeline of workers for the state’s chip industry and diversifying the talent pool working in semiconductors.

For prospective semiconductor workers like Chukwuemeka, 38, an immigrant from Nigeria, the classes represent a chance to learn a trade and explore a new career. She said the program is especially appealing because it encourages students to collaborate as they learn, working together to solve problems and use tools and instruments.

“I’m a very inquisitive person,” Chukwuemeka said. “So regardless of whether I know you or not, I want to learn from you.”

Oregon expects to add more than 6,000 semiconductor jobs over the next several years as Intel and other manufacturers expand their factories, boosted in part by $250 million in state funding. With the chip industry already battling a chronic worker shortage, employers and local governments hope programs like the Quick Start class can help fill that need and make family-wage careers available to people who might have never considered working in technology.

The students in Holt’s class are the 14th cohort that’s participated in the program since Oregon launched it a year ago. That’s roughly 200 students overall who have graduated from the monthly program at PCC’s Willow Creek campus. It’s modeled on a similar program that feeds Arizona’s chip industry.

The Oregon students get paid $500 a week to attend the half-day sessions. The program is funded by about $500,000 in grants from state worker training and education funds, and by Washington County.

During their two weeks in Quick Start, students work with wrenches and hydraulic tools, learn the basics of circuitry and electrical measurement and study how to repair a simple mechanical system. They try working while cloaked in bunny suits like factory workers wear in clean rooms and practice interviewing for a job. There’s homework every day but organizers say few students drop out.

Those who complete the program can apply for an interview with Intel and most do. About 60% are ultimately hired, organizers say, for entry-level factory technician jobs paying between $37,000 and $50,000 a year. Intel offers them additional training after they start and an opportunity to move up in their careers to more technical jobs with bigger paychecks.

The Quick Start program is open to anyone but organizers say Intel prefers applicants who already have some work experience and now want to build a career.

“They’ll hire younger folks in their early 20s, but they think that 18-year-olds or people fresh out of high school are a little too green,” said Jesse Aronson, program manager with Worksystems, a nonprofit workforce development agency serving the Portland area.

Quick Start organizers are focused on recruiting through social service agencies and workforce programs that primarily serve populations under-represented in the technology sector. That includes women (Quick Start has had two all-female cohorts) and racial and ethnic minorities.

PCC vets applicants with an online quiz, asking multiple-choice math and workplace questions. Program candidates watch a short YouTube video about semiconductor manufacturing, then answer questions about what they’ve learned.

Students are also screened about their openness to working long hours in a factory cleanroom wearing a bunny suit, which prevents even microscopic particles from contaminating the tiny features on computer chips. Intel hires for 12-hour shifts and its factory technicians alternate three-day and four-day workweeks.

“It’s not for everyone,” Aronson said.

And yet there’s a waiting list for Quick Start training. PCC plans to double-up in November and December, training two cohorts each month to reach more students.

Front-line workers in Oregon’s chip industry often come through two-year community college program and take more senior manufacturing jobs that pay around $60,000 a year, well above the starting salary for most Quick Start graduates.

But Andrew McGough, Worksystems’ executive director, said students find Quick Start appealing because they learn practical skills in a short time frame, and because they’re compensated for their time.

“I think that’s the promise of this kind of a model,” he said, “because it’s a new way to deliver training.”

Organizers just received $1 million in funding from Future Ready Oregon, the state’s new workforce development program, to extend and expand the Quick Start course. They hope to offer it in Northeast Portland and through Mt. Hood Community College in Gresham, close to Onsemi and Microchip’s semiconductor factories.

But Worksystems had sought more than twice as much funding from the state. So organizers are considering cutting the student stipend in half and reducing the number of Quick Start students they plan to train next year, from 600 to 400.

Still, that’s twice as many people as Quick Start has reached in its first 12 months.

Ariel Kotyrlo already works at Intel, moving pods of equipment around a factory. She works a night shift and wants to move up in her career.

So Kotyrlo, 20, heads to PCC when she wraps up her shift at 6:45 a.m. for her Quick Start training. It makes for long days but Kotyrlo said she jumped at the opportunity when supervisors recommended her for the class.

“I always strive to learn new things,” she said.

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