1.07 million workers were unemployed in Q3 2107

The unemployment rate of people of working age fell to 2.21 percent.

However, the number of unemployed workers with bachelor’s degree increased by 53,900 compared with the second quarter of 2017 to 237,000. The unemployment rate increased from 3.63 percent in Q2 to 4.51 percent in Q3.

Asked if MOLISA (Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs) had thought about re-training unemployed bachelor’s degree graduates, Minister Dao Ngoc Dung said many solutions are needed to deal with unemployment.

He said the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET), not MOLISA, has to be responsible for training quality. MOLISA just gives figures to assess the employment situation, job demand and number of unemployed workers. MOET determines the training scale based on job demand.

Luu Quang Tuan, deputy head of the Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs, commented that 237,000 unemployed workers with bachelor’s degree are caused by several reasons. First, training quality. Second, the country’s economic development. Third, the lack of information about the labor market and the imbalance in supply and demand.

An analyst noted that university students usually graduate at certain times of year, so the number of unemployed bachelor’s degree graduates increases at certain times.

He believes the major problem lies in an imbalance between supply and demand. The increasingly high percentage of unemployed university graduates is attributed to the large training scale, with many new universities established in recent years.

A report shows that Vietnam now has 412 universities and junior colleges, which means each province/city has 6.6 schools.

While enterprises have high demand for technically skilled workers for production lines, training establishments offer bachelor’s degree graduates with theoretical knowledge.

“The high unemployment rate among bachelor’s degree graduates has relations to labor demand of the national economy,” he said.

According to Tuan, the number of Vietnamese workers exported abroad in the last three years has been increasing rapidly. In the past, only 70,000-80,000 workers were sent abroad a year, but the figure is now 100,000. 

The exported workers don’t have bachelor’s degrees, but are skilled technical workers.  Most of them go to Singapore and Japan.

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