In an effort to meet the growing demand for human resources in the country, Vietnam’s Directorate of Vocational Education under the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) said that the government targets to provide vocational training to 2.2 million people this year.

According to Deputy MOLISA Le Quan, over the past years vocational training has gained encouraging results, with over 70 percent trainees having found jobs after graduation. Speaking to media at a recent press briefing, the deputy said that the trainees get an average salary of VND7-10 million, Vietnam News reports.

He added that successful employment gained from the programme has helped raise public awareness on the importance of vocational training. Many families now support and urge their children to sign up for the training programme as an option to quickly join the workforce. Vocational training course offered by the government is expected to help talents learn new things and new skills which will help them find job easily.

However, the deputy noted that there are shortcomings in vocational training, such as low training quality of some institutions, failure to meet the demand for human resources from specific sectors and industries, as well as lack of economic reforms. Additionally, Mr Quan said that poor command of foreign language such as English, lack of soft skills, and slow renewal of public vocational training institutions also become among the challenges in the implementation of the programme.

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Minister Dao Ngoc Dung shared expressed the same view by saying that the training quality of vocational education was still low and unable to meet current demand of businesses and society. He said that vocational education should target to improve the quality of human resources. Therefore, it should focus on strengthening the linkages between training institutions and enterprises to meet labour market demands, setting the standards for the education, while building a system for supervision and assessment.

Mr Quan further said that promoting the application of information technology in vocational education was necessary. MOLISA is set to launch a mobile-app vocational training in May this year to help trainees know more about the training programmes, training institutions and employment opportunities. The ministry is also piloting a programme that provides joint vocational training with many businesses to meet their real demand. The implementation of such programme is seen to bring in positive results.

Meanwhile, Director of the Vietnam Vocational Training Accreditation Agency, Pham Vu Quoc Binh said at a recent conference on vocational training cooperation between Vietnam and the United Kingdom that the rapid development of the fourth Industrial Revolution was posing numerous challenges for the country’s economy. Vietnam needs to build an open and modern occupational education system to create high-quality workforce, he said. According to him, businesses should take active participation to meet this goal, such as defining training demand, increasing the quality of student-centric training, as well as building quality training system.

Currently, there are more than 1,900 vocational training across Vietnam, including 395 colleges and 545 vocational schools. They offer programmes in various sectors, such as tourism, beauty services, IT, construction, fashion, garment and textiles, pharmaceuticals, precision mechanics and hotel management.

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