VietNamNet Bridge – A lot of hi-tech enterprises are planning to
expand their business in 2011 and recruit a large number of workers. However,
while the demand for hi-tech labor force is on the rise, the supply does not
increase accordingly.

According to Nguyen Thuong
Hai, Intel Vietnam’s
Education Director, the number of workers at Intel’s factory in Vietnam
would reach 885 by the end of the year, an increase of 385 workers over 2010.
Especially, the number would be 4000 workers when the factory operates at full
capacity.

Developing the staff of
Vietnamese engineers to replace foreign experts is now the top priority of
Intel’s training strategy.

Meanwhile, FPT Soft, a
software company, plans to recruit about 1000 workers, who are new graduates,
this year. Phan Phuong Dat, Deputy General Director of FPT Soft, said that the
labor demand of the company increases by 30-40 percent every year.

However, the major problem
for both Intel and FPT Soft is that the quality of new university graduates is
not high enough to meet the requirements of enterprises.

According to Hai, there is
still a big gap between the requirements set by Intel and the actual qualification
of new graduates. 100 percent of workers employed by Intel have to take training
courses that last 3-6 months before officially taking their jobs.

Hai said that it is even
more difficult to recruit experienced engineers in Vietnam, because the engineers
Intel needs are very scarce.

He went on to say that Vietnam
will not be able to develop high technologies if it does not have a healthy and
perfect education system. He has urged schools to improve the quality of the
students they train. New graduates need to have deep professional knowledge,
have good English skills and have soft skills, such as being able to work in teams.

Like Intel, FPT Soft also
has to retrain new school graduates for three months before putting them into
works at projects.

Deputy Minister of Science
and the Environment Nguyen Van Lang also complains that Vietnam is seriously lacking
hi-tech labor force. The universities nationwide every year can provide 110,000
information technology engineers a year. The universities and junior colleges
in HCM City alone produce 15,000 IT workers a
year. However, only 10 percent of the graduated students can serve well in the
industry.

Dat from FPT Soft has
suggested that schools should change the time when students to graduate. At
present, all students finish their training courses in summer. This has led to a
problem in which enterprises lack laborers at other times of the year.

While hi-tech enterprises
complain about the quality of new graduates, universities believe that
enterprises also should take responsibility for the problem.

Phi Dac Hai, President of
the Korea-Vietnam
Friendship Information
Technology College,
said that the main reason behind the problem is the lack of the cooperation
between enterprises and schools. “The training curriculums are not reasonable
because there is no cooperation between production and training,” he said.
“Though enterprises get benefits from training, they do not give support to the
training”.

Hai said that in many other
countries in the world, the government imposes the education tax on enterprises
based on the number of workers the enterprises use.

Sharing the same view,
Nguyen Ngoc Binh, Rector of the University of Technology under the Hanoi
National University, said that enterprises should cooperate with schools in
training by offering an environment for students to practice and train skills
for students.

On March 22, the University of Technology
under the Hanoi National
University and IBM Vietnam signed a
memorandum of understanding on the establishment of the first Center of Excellent IBM-UET
in Vietnam.
The center will be setup to train laborers with high qualifications and skills
in the IT sector, especially in the mainframe.

C. V