VietNamNet Bridge – The tourism industry, expected to be one of the spearheads of Viet Nam’s economic growth in the future, hopes to have 80 per cent of its workers professionally trained by 2015, the tourism authority has said.

The country’s 40 universities and 83 colleges that have tourism-hospitality faculties have failed to supply qualified human resources.

Only 7 per cent of the workers have tertiary education while half of them cannot communicate in English, a major hurdle to attracting foreign tourists, it said.

Training fails

The country’s 40 universities and 83 colleges that have tourism-hospitality faculties have failed to supply qualified human resources, it admitted.

Insiders said the training quality is very poor. Since lecturers do not work directly in the tourism or hospitality industry, the programmes are theory-based, Nguyen Phu Duc, chairman of Viet Nam Tourism Association, said.

Businesses said it takes two to three years on average to retrain new graduates to fit their needs.

A number of schools are, admittedly, trying to invest more in their facilities. Saigontourist Travel Co, for instance, plans to build a hotel to provide internships for students of the HCM City Hotel and Tourism Training School.

Ha Thanh Hai, deputy general director of the Sofitel Metropole Hotel in Ha Noi, said with the tourism and hospitality industries thriving, finding good personnel has become an urgent need.

The Metropole has to provide refresher training to its staff for four hours every month.

Speaking at a conference on human resources development in tourism earlier this month. Prof Steven Chua, president of SHATEC-Singapore Hotel and Tourism Education Center, said a personnel shortage was also threatening many other countries like Singapore and Japan.

The quality of tourism and hospitality services in Viet Nam is just better than in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, and far worse than in other countries in Southeast Asia, Nguyen Manh Cuong, VNAT deputy general director, said.

Not uniform

The quality is not uniform throughout Viet Nam. A three-star hotel in Ha Noi is much different from its counterpart in Thai Nguyen Province, he said.

“It generally affects the image of the entire industry”, he added.

By 2015 he proposed an overhaul of this sector in terms of training and education programmes to improve human-resource quality and urged the Government to make strategies for long-term development.

VNAT estimates six million foreign arrivals and 25 million domestic tourists to provide the industry a turnover of US$4-4.5 billion in 2010, a one-third increase over current figures in terms of both volume and value. Then, the industry would need around two million workers, double the current number, it said.

(Source: Viet Nam News)