Vietnam looks puzzled in preparing labour force for IT industry

VietNamNet Bridge – Despite deciding that information technology (IT) will play a very important role in the development of the knowledge-based economy, Vietnam still looks puzzled in preparing the labour force for the industry.

In the last 10 years, the IT and communication training capability of Vietnam has increased by five times, but the quality of the IT labour force has not increased accordingly.

In the period from 2000 to 2010, the number of schools which provide university training (4- year training) in IT and communication has been increasing steadily by 17 percent per annum, while the number of schools which provide junior college training (3-year training) has increased by 19 percent.

However, according to Quach Tuan Ngoc, Director of the Information Technology Department under the Ministry of Education and Training, the training just can meet the requirements in terms of quality, while problems have still been existing in quality. Especially, IT officers still lack necessary foreign language skills and deep professional knowledge.

In general, after the graduation, students have to attend training courses organized by enterprises, or attend the courses on in-depth professional knowledge organized by big corporations such as Microsoft, Oracle or Cisco to be able to undertake their jobs at enterprises.

Most of IT and communication firms have affirmed that they have to give 3-6 month training courses to new employees (even if the employees have university degree) before assigning tasks to them. The Vietnam Post and Communication Group (VNPT), for example, had to spend money to give IT training courses to 5,000 workers. It is expected that in 5-10 years, VNPT will have to spend 500 billion dong on human resource development.

Dau tu newspaper has quoted a foreign source as saying that the company still hesitates to make investment in Vietnam just because of the labour force problem. The source said that if his company can get the support from the Government in the labour force issue, it will consider setting up a software solution centre in Vietnam in the next year.

Do Trung Ta, the Prime Minister’s special envoy in IT and communication, also said that Vietnam will only become the attractive destination for big IT groups in the world if it has a high quality workforce with IT engineers who can work both in Vietnam and foreign countries.

Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said that in order to upgrade the IT workforce, enterprises, instead of sitting and waiting, should get involved in the training process. “Enterprises should cooperate with schools. They need to pay money to get what they want,” Nhan said.

However, in order to do that, according to Nhan, it is necessary to set up a centre on forecasting the IT and communication labour force. The centre may be a unit of state agency, or belong to associations, or would be run by a company.

To date, three enterprises, TMA, VNPT and FPT, have set up training centres themselves to train the labour force that serves their demands. Le Truong Tung, President of FPT University said that the school still can meet 1/3 of the demand for labour force of FPT’s subsidiaries.