VietNamNet Bridge - About 400,000 students finish universities every year, but most of them cannot satisfy employers and they need to undergo retraining at their place of work. 

Therefore, businesses now tend to order schools to produce workers who can meet their standards.

A survey released by FALMI, a job center, in late May showed that the demand for workers has been increasing in nearly all business fields, from marketing/sales to mechanical engineering, from automation to information technology, from electrics and electronics to finance & banking.

In order to get workers who can satisfy business requirements, businesses either have to retrain workers or join forces with schools to organize training in accordance with ‘syllabuses’ set up by businesses.

Intel Products Vietnam’s CEO Sherry Boger complained that a lack of high-quality workers is a big difficulty for Intel. To deal with the problem, Intel has allocated a budget of $20 million to send students abroad for training and returning to Intel Vietnam.

Saigon Co-op also said it has to allocate a budget to send staff abroad for training every year, because in Vietnam, there is no school specializing in training workers for the retail sector.

About 400,000 students finish universities every year, but most of them cannot satisfy employers and they need to undergo retraining at their place of work.

According to the World Bank, Vietnam’s human resource quality ranks 11th among 12 surveyed countries in Asia with 3.70 score. Of 53.4 million workers aged 15 and above, only 49 percent attended training courses before and only 19 percent of them experienced training courses lasting three months or longer.

Surveys all show that Vietnam is lacking high-quality workers, and a workforce which can satisfy business requirements will remain scarce in the time to come.

The General Department of Vocational Training estimates that in 2016-2020, Vietnam needs to produce 6.7 million workers who finish intermediate school (2-year training) or junior colleges (3-year training) and 10 million workers who finish primary vocational schools.

Meanwhile, McKinsey, a consultancy group, forecasts that by 2020, Vietnam would lack 15 percent of skilled workers and have 10 percent of unemployed unskilled workers. 

It also said developing ASEAN countries, including Vietnam, would lack 45 million average skilled workers by 2020.

Most businesses, from those in finance & banking to FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), all offer Management Trainee programs to create a labor force to satisfy their requirements. 

These include big names such as Vinamilk (dairy producers), Hoa Sen (steel), Kido (sweets & consumer goods) and The Gioi Di Dong (mobile phone distributor).

In late August 2016, Prudential Vietnam signed a human resource development agreement with four prestigious universities – Hanoi Foreign Trade University, International University, University of Natural Sciences and RMIT.

Meanwhile, Big C, for many years, has joined forces with RMIT and AIT Vietnam to carry out training in retail administration.


Mai Lich