Director of Workforce Strategy for CHIPS
U.S. Department of Commerce
The Director of CHIPS Workforce Strategy, Scott Jensen, is leading the effort to make sure the semiconductor manufacturers in which the United States invests have the workers they need to succeed.
Having run two state labor departments, Jensen brings hard-won experience on how we scale solutions to our nation’s workforce challenges. In Maryland, Jensen’s EARN Maryland won the Kennedy School’s Ash Award for government innovation. By the time he left state service in Rhode Island, the Real Jobs RI program had trained 20,000 people for more than 2,000 companies in that famously tiny state, making Real Jobs the first intermediary-led program in the nation genuinely to approach regional scale.
Jensen began work at the CHIPS Program in July of 2023. Before reentering government service, he was the CEO of Research Improving People’s Lives, a “gov tech” non-profit, which brings contemporary computing to bear on public sector challenges – cloud-native data sharing, AI/ML applications and user-centered design In 2015, and again in 2019, he was unanimously confirmed to Gina Raimondo’s cabinet as Rhode Island Director of Labor and Training. Earlier Jensen served as Deputy Secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing, and Regulation. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Illinois State, a master’s degree in “great books” from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, and was a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City where he specialized in late-Husserlian and early-Heideggerian phenomenology and the relation of both to Wittgenstein. He is always eager to talk about how philosophy is important for politics and technology so don’t hesitate to ask him about it.
Scott lives in Easton, MD with his wife, who is a travel writer. They have a college-aged daughter majoring in classics and English literature, which neither mom nor dad would have any other way.
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Let's Get to Work: CHIPS for America's Workforce Accomplishments and Plans
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
2:50pm – 3:15pm PDT