Owing to lack of job opportunities available for thousands of university graduates in Vietnam’s domestic market, The Ministry of Labour, War Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) is now considering to export skilled labour to international markets.
Those graduates with professionally skilled and technical qualifications, who are unemployed, will be sent abroad to work in target markets of Japan, South Korea, Germany and Slovakia from 2017 to 2020.
Tong Hai Nam, deputy head of MOLISA’s Overseas Workers Department, confirmed that the ministry is putting forward solutions to create jobs for university graduates, but declined to divulge further details about the plan, Vietnam.net reports. He said, it is still necessary to evaluate the feasibility of the project before decisions are finalised.
According to sources, Vietnam currently has 200,000 unemployed bachelor’s degree graduates, but there is no further information available on the group of industry subjects these unemployed graduates represent, what majors they were trained whether social sciences or polytechnic and so on.
It is further necessary to find out the reasons for their unemployment – if they could not find any jobs or they couldn’t find jobs that meet their expectations and salary requirements. Without such critical details, it is difficult for a labour export plan to be implemented.
Further implementation of such plan is successful depending on certain business fields and industries, such as “Nurses recently sent to Japan and Germany have been highly appreciated. Vietnamese workers in Information Technology sent to Japan and Singapore, or high-quality welders to South Korea, are also very welcomed,” said Pham Do Nhat Tan, deputy chair of VAMAS (Vietnam Association of Manpower Supply).
Tan further added, the success of the plan depends if Vietnam can supply workers in the fields the target markets want. Not all university graduates can be sent abroad.
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Minister of Education and Training (MOET), Phung Xuan Nha has asked universities to publicize surveys and reports on the employment of their graduates. The statistics must be published on the schools’ websites, beginning this year.
Expressing worry on this unemployment issue discouraging many university grads in Vietnam from pursuing higher education, Nguyen Thi Kim Phung, director of the University Education Department said earlier month, “The number of 200,000 unemployed university grads must not be seen as a bugbear for students. While this should be seen more as a warning for students and parents to consider before deciding upon what a student should do, after finishing high school.”
Citing findings from a report by MOLISA in 2014 that showed, Vietnam had more than 5 million workers with higher education level (7.3 percent), and 200,000 of them were unemployed, or 4 percent. Kim Phung said, “The situation would be serious only if the unemployment rate is five percent of higher, while a low unemployment rate would only create competitive impetus for employees and training establishments.”
Commenting on the situation, Do Van Dung, rector of the HCMC University of Polytechnic Education said, “The unemployment of university grads is not only the story of Vietnam, but of many countries, including developed ones. In Finland, for example, which has an advanced education system; the unemployment rate of trained workers is 12 percent. In China, with a large population, the unemployment rate is at 4 percent. As such, 431,000 redundant trained workers in Vietnam is quite normal.”
Also read: Positive Job Outlook for Vietnamese Professionals in 2017
Image credit: vietnamnet.vn
