According to a recent report on ‘Recruitment Demand and Labour Supply in Vietnam in the first half of 2017’ released by VietnamWorks, a member of Navigos Vietnam, IT stills leads in recruitment demand. However, qualified job seekers in the sector can only meet 50% of the demand which leads to IT enterprises’ competitive environment in attracting good candidates. Lacking of high skills labour is the same concern for job recruitment in other sectors such as Advertising, Communications, Manufacturing and Accounting.

Following the VietnamWorks’ report, recruitment demand for IT increased 20 per cent year-on-year and the number of job seekers rose 14 per cent in the first half of 2017. This has remained IT sector’s leading position in recruitment demand. However, only 50% of job seekers in the sector can satisfy jobs’ demand. This has caused IT enterprises a competitive environment in attracting qualified candidates. The market is short of developers in Java, .Net, Mobile, and PHP. There are new programming languages also lacking in developers, such as Ruby on Rails, Golang, and JavaScript, and related frameworks like ReactJS and NodeJs, despite the high salaries on offer.

In a forecast for recruitment demand in IT industry, the trend is expected to keep growing rapidly over the next three years with a high demand for IT engineers in the data processing field and IT engineers with experience in machine learning, part of the artificial intelligence field.

Shortage of high skills labour is happening in other sectors including Advertising, Communications, and Electric & Electronics Engineering. Lacking high skills workers is more serous in Advertising and Communication where a recent rapid increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) to Vietnam leads to competition between local companies and foreign invested enterprises in hunting and hiring quality human resources to run many ‘brand building’ and communication campaigns. Forecasts show the sectors will continue facing a labour shortage in the future.

Source: http://dtinews.vn/en/news/024/52095/it-still-leads-in-recruitment-demand.html 

Commentary by Phuong Pham, British Council Vietnam:

With a continuous growing demand for high quality graduates in IT/ Computer Science in recent years, educational institutions in Vietnam have been taking rigorous solutions to improve quality of their training programmes. Building partnership and TNE programmes in this subject area with overseas institutions is one of their key solutions. According to statistics from Vietnam MOET, up to March 2017, there are 32 active TNE programmes in IT/ Computer Sciences, of which UK accounts for only 15% with 8 programmes. Main traditional partners in this field are US, Australia, France while Japan is an emerging one. Moreover, US companies specialised in IT have been very active in partnering with local universities to improve training programmes in this area, as a way to support human resources supply for IT start-up companies, especially in Ho Chi Minh City where a project of 1.5 billion USD to set up a “Silicon City” has just been invested, promising to attract many American venture capital firms.

The potential for partnership in IT/Computer Science, therefore, seems to be very challenging for UK institutions, though still be open. UK institutions need to focus on their ‘niche’ strengths in this field. Articulation agreements (2+2, 3+1) are still the most popular TNE models. Expanding partnerships to other types of institutions like private universities and colleges, rather than focusing on public universities which have existing TNE programmes in this area, should also be considered.

On the other hand, Advertising and Communication is still an un-tapped area for TNE. In total, there are only 5 TNE programmes, two of which are from UK institutions. UK institutions should keep an eye on these areas given their high reputation in education programmes of Media and Communication management.