By 2020, the tourism sector would make up 10%  of GDP

The Party Politburo’s Resolution No 08 on developing tourism into a key industry stipulates that by 2020, the tourism sector would make up 10 percent of GDP and create 4 million jobs.

Meanwhile, according to the Vietnam Institute for Tourism Development Research, by the end of 2015, the tourism sector had had 2.2 million workers only, including 600,000 direct workers. The demand for human resources in the tourism industry is very large but the supply is poor.

The Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT) said the tourism sector needs nearly 40,000 workers more every year, but training establishments only produce 20,000. Of these, only 1,800 graduated from universities and junior colleges, and 2,100 graduated from tourism vocational schools (3-year training), while the others attended short-term training courses.

Golden T Travel director Nguyen Trung Thanh commented that the quality of the workforce in the tourism sector is ‘problematic’. Travel firms have to spend money and time to retrain newly recruited workers, including tourism major graduates.

Many workers do not have good foreign language and informatics skills, though they are  important for the field. The lack of soft skills and professional ethics of the workforce is also a concern. 

According to Nguyen Van Dinh, deputy chair of the Vietnam Tourism Training Association, about 60 percent of the workforce can speak foreign languages, mostly English, while only 5 percent can speak Chinese and 4 percent French. Of this, the number of workers who can speak foreign languages fluently accounts for 15 percent. Most of them are tour guides and hotel receptionists.

Regarding the teaching staff, there are 5,000 workers involved in training. This includes 2,000 teachers and lecturers, 2,580 trainers and 540 managerial officers. The figures, according to Dinh, cannot satisfy training demand. 

To deal with the serious manpower shortage, MOET has proposed tourism major training. University graduates are being encouraged to study for a second bachelor’s degree in tourism. 

The special policy will be applied to majors including tourism, travel and tourism management, hotel management, restaurant management and catering services.

During the training, versities must cooperate closely with enterprises during the training.

According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, by 2016, Vietnam had 156 tourism majoring training establishments, including 48 universities, 43 junior colleges and vocational schools. However, there is no official core curriculum. 

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Mai Thanh