In the last 20 years, the number of Vietnamese workers has increased by 19 million from 35 million in 1996 to 54.4 million in 2016. According to the General Statistics Office (GSO), Vietnam’s productivity has improved considerably during that period, but it is still lower than in other regional countries.

In 2015, Vietnam’s average productivity was equal to 4.4 percent of Singapore’s, 17.4 percent of Malaysia’s, 35.2 percent of Thailand’s, 48.5 percent of the Philippines’ and 48.8 percent of Indonesia. The lack of skilled manpower to meet the changing modern economy is becoming a drag on productivity.

The 4.0 industrial revolution has created technological breakthroughs that has helped some industries reach outstanding growth and other industries fall into recession. 

The changes are putting pressure on training establishments and forcing them to reform  training to create employees who can satisfy market demands.

Experts say that this trend puts the greatest pressure on the IT industry in Vietnam, when the industry is entering a stage with the highest demand in the labor history of Vietnam.

Determining new training models is a challenge, the training system has not been updated and lacks linkages with factories.

According to Hoang Nam Tien, president of FPT Software, the number of IT engineers to be trained from now to 2020 needs to increase by threefold to be able to satisfy  quantitative demand.

At the pre-conference session of the Private Business Forum 2017, which took place on July 26, Pham Van Hai from Hanoi University of Technology said the school can produce 500 engineers and 200 workers under other training modes, but third-year students are nearly running out. 

FPT Group, the largest Vietnamese IT group, needs 2,500 engineers a year.

“As such, the number of bachelor’s degree graduates we produce a year is not enough for one enterprise,” Hai said.

A report from VietnamWorks released in 2015 showed that Vietnam would need 1.2 million IT workers by 2020. However, if the number of IT workers increases by 8 percent per annum, Vietnam will lack 500,000 workers, or 78 percent of the workers needed.

IT is one of the business fields in which workers can get the highest pay. According to TopDev, IT firms most want staff with more than two years of experience (75 percent of total demand). These staff are offered $750-812 a month, or VND17-18.5 million.

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