VietNamNet Bridge – Employees in the tourism industry certified by the Tourism Certification Board in any one of the ten ASEAN members will be recognized by the others and thus able to find jobs in the region from 2015 under the ASEAN Mutual Recognition Arrangement on Tourism, signed four years ago.

The agreement was signed by tourism ministers of ASEAN members in 2009 and will be effective in 2015, said Hoang Thi Diep, deputy director of the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT).

The ASEAN tourism industry has already built up the common career criteria for the business fields of reception, hotel rooms, kitchen, catering services, travel agencies and tour operation, Diep said. The common vocational training curriculum has also been prepared, with many nations like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand already appointing national level authorities to grant certificates to tourism practitioners, she added.

“The agreement will be effective in May 2015, offering better opportunities to job seekers in the tourism industry. The member countries will also launch a common website on labor demands in every nation so that qualified applicants can apply accordingly,” she told the Daily at a seminar on the agreement deployment in the central coast city of Danang on Thursday. A similar seminar will also take place in HCMC on September 13.

As the total number of employees in the tourism industry is small, at around 500,000 direct employees and one million indirect workers as reported by VNAT, labor supply for the industry’s development demand is still insufficient. The tourism industry is projected to need double that in 2015, with 620,000 direct workers needed to serve up to 7-7.5 million foreign tourists and an estimated 36 million local visitors.

Diep expected the agreement’s execution to help the local tourism industry find better human resources to meet its development, which creates opportunities for skilled workers to get better jobs. However, she remarked, this is also a challenge which could result in local firms losing good workers to other players in the region.

Similarly, employees might lose their jobs if failing to improve skills to compete with others with the agreement in place, she stated.

Diep said the local tourism industry needs to make great efforts to utilize the vast opportunities of the agreement for further development and that relevant authorities are doing their best to train a workforce with higher quality under a project funded by the European Union.

Source: SGT