On Saturday mornings, 19-year-old Anthony Deary sets his alarm for 5 a.m.

He’s out the door of his Round Rock house an hour later, headed toward Samsung’s hulking 2.3 million-square-foot manufacturing facility in Northeast Austin to work a 12-hour shift.

Deary is an apprentice technician at Samsung. It will take two years to teach him how to maintain the expensive and highly-automated manufacturing equipment that churns out new silicon chips for the South Korea-based electronics company.

As part of a new program, Samsung Austin Semiconductor -- which is the name of Samsung’s business operations in Austin -- is hiring manufacturing technicians right out of high school, putting them through a two-year apprenticeship while paying for them to get an associate’s degree in the Electronics and Advanced Technologies Department at Austin Community College.

Samsung, which employs about 3,000 people in Austin, wants to find and train more manufacturing technicians in Central Texas. These skilled manufacturing jobs don’t require a college degree, and yet Samsung says they struggle to find enough workers to fill them in booming Austin.

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