VietNamNet Bridge - Many new graduates are too demanding, are hesitant to work overtime, and lack soft skills and foreign language skills, recruiters say.

A job day recently organized by the HCMC Student Support Center attracted thousands of bachelor’s degree graduates. About 5,000 jobs were offered on the day, from high-ranking managers and technical officers to salespeople and assistants. However, many graduates still returned empty-handed.

Nguyen Trong Hoang from the HCMC Student Support Center, said many students were too demanding. They wanted jobs which could bring high salaries and they refused jobs where they could get more experience.

Also according to Hoang, employers want candidates who not only have good professional knowledge, but also good soft skills and can work under pressure. However, most of the new graduates could not satisfy the requirements.

Tran Anh Tuan, deputy director of the HCMC Labor Market Forecast Center, commented that young workers still lack many skills to join the ASEAN labor market. Though job opportunities have been opened to eight careers in the regional labor market, Vietnam's tourism sector is the only one that can meet ASEAN standards.

Thanh Nien reported that many bachelor’s degree graduates and engineers refuse good jobs because of many reasons, including low salaries and employers' lack of a well-known name. 

Cao Trung Hieu, founder and manager of a software firm in HCMC, said the firm operates as a lean startup which has a small office, low number of workers and doesn’t launch expensive advertisement campaigns.

Though the company offers very good salaries (VND13 million a month for customer care officers and VND15 million for salespeople), it is still hard to hire new graduates.

Business Matching Vietnam wants a full-time officer, offering monthly salary of VND5 million, and some other allowances. 

After the ad about recruitment was released, many bachelor’s degree graduates applied for the job. However, after they got the job, they did not turn up at the office. 

According to Nguyen Thi Phu from the Center for Educational Evaluation and Accreditation, 58 percent of university graduates don’t know where to apply for jobs, 42 percent cannot meet the requirements set by employers, and 27 percent cannot find jobs because their majors are not in demand in the labor market. 

Phu noted that 18 percent of university graduates are trained in majors which employers are unfamiliar with.

This shows that loopholes exist in career counseling for university students. Many schools produce low-quality bachelors and master's graduates, while others still enroll students in majors for which the labor market doesn’t have high demand.

MOET has requested training establishments to report the employment rate of their graduates.

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