Under-skilled Vietnamese workforce hindering production: survey

From
WIRE REPORTS

            More
than 60 percent of foreign companies in Viet Nam say the current Vietnamese
workforce hinders production due to its lack of skills, a media site recently quoted a survey as saying.

            The
survey of 350 foreign and local companies in services and production found that
40 percent of local companies shared the same opinion.

            The
poll was conducted in Ha Noi, Sai Gon and adjacent provinces by the World Bank
and the Central Institute for Economic Management, one of Viet Nam’s top think
tanks, the news website reported.

            The
survey also revealed that nearly 30 percent of foreign companies, and 17
percent of local companies considered the local unskilled workforce as a major
hindrance.

            Even
with the trained workforce, the surveyed employers ― 31 percent of foreign and
nearly 23 percent of local ones ― said they were obstruction, the website reported. 

            According
to the survey, 66 percent of foreign employers were unsatisfied with the
quality of local education and human resource training. The rate was 36 percent
for local companies.

            The
fields of technique, management, office and sales services most often were
blamed for the lack of skilled applicants, it said.

            Speaking
to the news site, Christian
Bodewig, senior economist and human development sector coordinator for World
Bank in Viet Nam, said that the lack of skills is common for the workforces of
developing economies, adding that the dynamic leads to poor creativity.

            Meanwhile,
Vu Tuan Anh, managing director of the Ha Noi-based Institute for Management
Research and Training, said companies need to be “proactive” when investing in
human resources as they are the ones who first benefit from fresh graduates,
and the ones which suffer when the labor pool’s skills are underdeveloped.

            “It
is natural to train staff, if we aim for high productivity,” he said, citing
that the South Korean-owned steel maker Posco Company built a school to train
its workforce.

            However,
one of the “simpler” solutions, according to Anh, is to train between three and
four human resource experts to develop a source of labor for Vietnamese
companies.

            At
the moment, there are between 200,000 and 250,000 experts in human resources in
the country, which is “small” compared to its millions of laborers, he added.

            On
the other hand, laborers also need to “save themselves” through self-study that
is supported by their employers, said the expert, who has worked in the field
of human resources training for foreign and local organizations for over 15
years.

            Speaking
about the demand for a better trained workforce, Anh said over the past 20
years of economic reforms, Viet Nam has relied on the low costs of labor and
raw materials, but such a way of doing business is becoming obsolete.

            “If
we continue doing so, we will only go down together. It is a dead-end road for
Vietnamese businesses,” he said.