Sep 23, 2011

Vietnam - Part 2: Vietnamese students don’t want to enter navigation schools


LookAtVietnam - Navigation, one of the training branches which is considered very important for the development of the sea-borne economy, is lagging behind the world. Vietnam does not have many schools training navigators, while navigation school graduates refuse to take this job.

There are two universities, two junior colleges and two vocational schools that train navigators, which produce 1000-1500 graduates every year. However, only 50 percent of the graduates take the jobs as there are trained.

Few candidates to enroll

The two most important training establishments which provide the labor force for Vietnam’s navigation are the Vietnam Maritime University in Hai Phong City and the HCM City Transport University. In the past, very strict requirements were set on the students who followed the majors, and the students chosen for studying were always the best.

However, in the last few years, when the number of students registering to study these majors keeps decreasing, schools have to ease the requirements in order to find enough learners. Examinees just need to obtain 13 marks, the minimum required marks, from the university entrance exams, in order to be able to study navigation and shipbuilding techniques.

Only sea-relating economics majors still require high marks. For example, students must obtain at least 17.5 marks from the university entrance exams to enter the maritime transport economics faculty of the Maritime University in 2011.

According to Co Tan Anh Vu, Head of the Training Division of the HCM City Transport University, ship control and ship engine exploitation are the two majors which have the highest training quotas thanks to the increasingly high demand from enterprises. However, it is very difficult to enroll students for the two majors.

Tieu Van Kinh, Captain from the HCM City Sea Science and Economics Association, has warned that the “crew crisis” is getting more evident in Vietnam with the fleet of thousands of ships and the number of ships is still unceasingly increasing.

It is estimated that the schools can provide 1500 seamen a year, while the same number of navigators leave their job every year. This means that the number of navigators do not increase every year.

According to the Vietnam Maritime Bureau, Vietnam is lacking 600-1000 maritime commissioned officers, mostly management officers. This figure does not include the number of officers for labor export.
Inappropriate investments

Experts have pointed out that one of the biggest problems of navigation training is the bad training environment. Vu said that Vietnamese crews are recognized by the International Maritime Organization IMO as having good virtues, and Vietnamese training should have met the international standards.

However, with the modest investment rate, it is very difficult to have high quality training. In general, the budged total expense on training students is 1.8 million dong per annum, a very small sum of money which is even not enough to charter a ship for one week for students’ internship.

University students graduate from the schools after five years of training, during which they get a lot of theoretical knowledge. However, experts say, while schools are too concentrating in providing theoretical knowledge, students do not have the opportunities to access very basic practical knowledge necessary for navigators.

Minh Duc, a student who has graduated the ship control faculty, said that the knowledge he got at the school is not really practical. A lot of graduates are not healthy enough to work on ships. A lot of students decide to give up study after returning from internship because they feel that they cannot exist in such difficult conditions of the jobs.

Source: SGTT



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