Promising outlook for job seekers in Vietnam With no signs of foreign investment slowing down anytime soon and the expectation that transnational businesses will continue relocating to Vietnam during 2016, staffing agencies say the job market for professionals looks promising. They say transnational companies are looking specifically to hire more mid to senior-level professionals, who possess good language, interpersonal and international business experience in hopes of closing the skills gap. They are also predicting the trend for recruiting Overseas Vietnamese (OVs) professionals will continue in 2016, as hiring these internationally experienced candidates will aid significantly in bridging the gap between candidates required for middle management positions as well as those for more senior roles. The plan to hire more experienced OVs workers is expected to play a pivotal role in assisting transnational companies design solid management succession strategies by recruiting candidates capable of moving to the very top levels of the company. They say their surveys also show that as more manufacturing plants establish operations in the Southeast Asian nation, professionals skilled in engineering, procurement, sourcing and supply chain will see increased job opportunities. Additionally, the entrance of mobile applications and tech start-ups will steer recruitment for IT candidates towards iOS development, Android development as well as graphic design. Meanwhile, demand for marketers within the technical healthcare sector will continue to spiral upwards as global health related firms expand their presence and more competitors enter the Vietnamese market. In 2016, they specifically foresee more manufacturing operations entering Vietnam from China, Thailand, Japan and the Republic of Korea (RoK) in a variety of industries including electronics, textiles and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). Equipping the nation’s workforces with the skillsets needed during this period of rapid economic and employment growth is a daunting, long and arduous task for Vietnam’s educational system. Recently a VOV reporter interviewed a representative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Nguyen Tien Phong, to discuss a report the UNDP issued discussing the health of the nation’s education system. The 2015 Vietnam Human Development Report on inclusive growth, covering the period 2004-2012, conducted in collaboration with the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) shows that the middle class in Vietnam is rising. For the full period from 2004 to 2012, inclusive, it shows that all population groups in Vietnam saw their incomes rise but the middle income groups benefited the most, and this underpins the emergence of a Vietnamese middle class, Phong said. So from this perspective, the educations system is satisfactorily supplying the population with the skillsets needed to find good paying jobs and increasing their income sufficiently to lift them out of poverty. However, the overall findings of the report, in a nutshell, found that much more needs to be done said Phong, to better train the nation’s workforces to make the most of its current middle-income stage of development and avoid being perpetually trapped there. Without better language, interpersonal and business skills there is a risk of serious inequality developing, as those without these skills are likely to be left behind as the economy keeps advancing and the better paying professional jobs all go to foreigners. VOV