Vietnam verfügt über 2.182 Berufsbildungszentren. Dennoch gibt es viel zu wenig gut ausgebildete Fachkräfte, die den Anforderungen der Industrie genügen. Insgesamt sind im industriellen Bereich schätzungsweise 40 Prozent ungelernte Arbeitskräfte beschäftigt.
Vietnam needs radical vocational training reforms
The country has about 200 industrial parks, economic and processing zones which employ 1.4 million workers, roughly 40 percent untrained.
Vietnam has 2,182 vocational training centers but still can’t supply enough properly skilled workers to cope with the demands of industry.
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education and Training, Nguyen Thien Nhan, made the statement at a May 31 online conference on vocational training with officials from Hanoi, central Da Nang City, Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho City in the south.
The shortage was caused by inadequate labor demand forecasts, loose cooperation between schools and enterprises, and the national mindset, which focuses on academia rather than vocational training.
Between 2001 and 2006, vocational centers around Vietnam turned out about 6.6 million workers, with an average year-on-year increase of 6.5 percent, according to statistics by the General Department of Job Training under the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA).
Vietnam, however, has not established any forecast agencies to monitor the demand for human resources, the Deputy PM said.
Accurate figures are not available.
School officials also fail to assess the level of training quality in their annual reports leaving local authorities in the dark, Nhan said. Deputy Minister of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, Dam Huu Dac, said the cooperation between schools and businesses was loose.
Vocational schools offer training courses based on their own resources and capacity, not on the demand or requirements of corporations, Dac said.
The training curricula were often impractical and most teachers, among over 30,400 vocational teachers nationwide, were unqualified, Nhan said.
Duong Duc Lan, deputy head of the MOLISA’s Job Training General Department, said the number of teachers proficient in IT and who could keep up with technology by reading manuals in foreign languages was very limited.
According to Dac, the Vietnamese mindset was another major problem. Most Vietnamese want their offspring to pursue higher education rather than vocational training after high school. Some managers from the Chu Lai Economic Zone in central Quang Nam Province said local authorities failed to draft appropriate policies for vocational training development. Instead each province aims to set up at least one university rather a vocational school, they said.
Lan said vocational courses and their benefits were not well publicized to attract students. According to representatives from the Ministry of Construction, there was a shortage of skilled workers in the sector; only 5.7 percent of two million laborers were trained.
Constructors have to recruit untrained laborers including local farmers in the off season, which impacts on the quality of work and causes safety issues. Building laborers with foreign language skills were rare, the ministry said.
Central Quang Ngai Province alone needs 8,000 trained laborers for steel rolling and processing but there is no training center in the central and central highlands regions, the provincial deputy head of Dung Quat Economic Zone’s Management Board, Mai Van Thanh, said.
Better cooperation a must Nhan said close cooperation among the state, enterprises, laborers and training centers was key to a better vocational training system. He also emphasized the need to publicize the quality of each vocational center.
Those producing high quality workers would be praised while centers providing below standard qualifications would be penalized. Most experts at the conference agreed that businesses, besides recruiting laborers from training centers, should set up training centers of their own.
Dac said vocational training run by businesses had many benefits since it would coincide with their requirements. Such trainees can work in the real work environment, not just study theories. This would economize costs for businesses, especially for retraining unqualified workers, according to Dac.
He said MOLISA would propose supportive policies to the government for corporations which opened training centers. The Dong Nai Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs proposed further support from tax, land, and bank loans for training centers to upgrade facilities and improve quality.
Vu Duy Hao, Principal of PetroVietnam Manpower Training College, suggested vocational schools should sign training contracts with businesses before selecting students.
Vocational centers should find out exactly what businesses required of their workers before training them, Hao said. According to MOLISA statistics, Vietnam has nearly 150 training centers run by corporations like Vietnam Shipbuilding Industry Corporation (Vinashin) and Vietnam Machinery Erection Corporation (LILAMA).
Le Van Hien, Principal of Lilama II Vocational Training Center, said student selection criteria needed to be tougher. Dac said local authorities should act to popularize the benefits of vocational courses for students and parents.
VIETNAM’S VOCATIONAL TRAINING SNAPSHOT
- Vocational training centers nationwide plan to enroll nearly 1.8 million students this year.
- According to the nation’s human resources development plan, as of 2010, Vietnam will be able to produce two million trained workers annually, some 310,000 of them highly skilled.
- There are 240,000 enterprises nationally with about 9 million laborers.
- As of 2010, the number of enterprises would reach 500,000, needing an additional 2.7 million workers. Hi-tech occupations like computer programmers, workers in the fields of electricity, electronics and agricultural product processing would have a high demand for trained workers.