VietNamNet Bridge – Thousands of tourism major students are produced every year, but travel
firms still complain they cannot recruit enough workers.
A report says Vietnam now has 284 schools that train
workers for the tourism sector. These include 62 universities (4-year
training), 80 junior colleges (3-year training) and 117 vocational schools.
According to the Vietnam Research Institute for
Tourism Development, the tourism sector would need 620,000 direct workers by
2015 and 870,000 by 2020. As such, both the demand and the supply are profuse.
However, the participants at a recent human resource
conference heard that the highest unemployment rate has been reported for the
hotel management majoring graduates.
It’s quite a surprise if noting that there are 13,000
tourism accommodations throughout the country, while the number of the tourism
accommodations nationwide has been increasing rapidly in the key tourism sites.
The workforce redundancy has led to the fact that a
high percentage of graduates have to take untrained jobs. Others take the job
of managers at mini hotels. Meanwhile, the luxurious 4 or 5 star hotels in
Vietnam have been managed by foreign groups which charge very high fees.
Do Thi Hong Xoan, Chair of the Vietnam Hotel
Association, explained that the quality of the labor force in the tourism
sector is still low which still cannot meet the international standards.
Xoan pointed out that tourism school graduates have
not been well trained in theory and practice. They have poor knowledge, bad
foreign language skills and especially, they don’t have necessary supporting
skills such as the skill of handling situations or understanding customers.
Also according to Xoan, the majority of the working
restaurant and hotel managers do not finish tourism schools, but they graduated
economics, foreign trade schools, or they were trained overseas.
Regarding the qualification of tour guides, the
director of a travel firm has noted that tourism school graduates cannot work
as the guides for inbound tours, because they are not good at foreign
languages.
Meanwhile, the graduates from foreign trade schools or
foreign language skills are good at foreign languages, but they don’t have
professional skills.
As a result, travel firms always have to retrain the
workers after the recruitment. Especially, the firms complained that it’s very
difficult to find the tour guides who can speak less common foreign languages.
Do Dinh Cuong, Director of Support Travel, said in
order to improve the quality of the workforce in the tourism sector, it’s
necessary to change the way of training.
Cuong has noted that the graduates of vocational
schools have better professional skills than the university graduates because
of the higher pragmatism of vocational schools. Meanwhile, university students
mostly spend their time on theoretical knowledge, while their internship hours
just account for 10 percent of the total time of the training courses.
However, the big disadvantage of vocational schools is
that they cannot produce high class personnel, such as hotel managers, or
international tour guides because of the current regulations that the tour
guides must have university degree.
Cuong believes that it would be better to increase the
internship period of students, so that they can learn more necessary skills for
their future careers.
However, experts say it’ll be very difficult to amend
the training curriculums. Training establishments, which don’t keep close
relations with travel firms, cannot send their students to the firms for the
internship.
To Quoc
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