Vietnam - City needs to restructure economy for HR development

HCMC – HCMC’s authorities will need to restructure the city’s economy if it wants to develop human resources, said experts at a conference held on Thursday on the need for training a qualified workforce.

HCMC, the country’s economic center, has only focused on labor-intensive industries such as clothing and leather footwear which provide no suitable jobs for graduates while they are finding it increasingly difficult to find unskilled workers, said Tran Dinh Thien, director of the Vietnam Economic Research Institute.

A change in the city’s economic structure will lead to a change in demands for the workforce’s quality, facilitating manpower training and supply plans, Thien added.

Dr. Le Thanh Mai from Vietnam National University of HCMC said that based on the number of students trained in all universities and the labor demand forecast of the southeast region, the labor demand of local firms until 2015 meets only 17% among the total number of graduates. It is because firms will mainly employ unskilled workers in the next few years and a small proportion of skilled ones.

Universities and colleges train people in accordance with enterprises’ current demands, not future demands. Courses on business administration, finance-banking, information technology and accounting are among top choices of students while there is a large number of graduates with accounting degrees who can’t find a job, causing a gap between supply and demand, Mai said.

HCMC needs to consider the competitiveness of Vietnam’s firms in the economic integration process as brain drain is inevitable if domestic firms are weaker than foreign ones, according to Dinh Son Hung from HCMC Institute for Development Studies.

Unfavorable macroeconomic conditions have spelled much trouble for local firms, seeing them take advantage of cheap labor. Labor redundancy is likely to occur if people are not based on the demands to be trained, said Hung.

HCMC’s Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs suggested the city provide supporting programs to attract employees, especially overseas students. The training of highly-skilled employees for enterprises should be focused on and will minimize the use of foreign staff with high salaries.

HCMC’s vice chairman Hua Ngoc Thuan said the city would seek to balance the labor supply and demand, look after top talents and contribute to the city’s economic development.

By Thanh Thuong - The Saigon Times Daily

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