Vietnam considers setting up standards for IT skills

Being concerned about the qualification of new IT school graduates, Vietnam now considers setting up new standards for IT skills in an effort to internationalize the quality of Vietnamese IT engineers.

The government of Vietnam has decided that information technology would be the key industry which serves as the major force for the economic development.

Vietnam hopes to have 1 million engineers and workers in the IT industry by 2020 who can meet international standards, and 30 percent of IT school graduates who have good professional qualifications and foreign language skills enough to join the international labor market.

This is really a challenge for Vietnam. Nguyen Trong Duong, Director of the IT Application Department of the Ministry of Information and Technology, also said that though Vietnam’s IT industry has been developing strongly, there still too many worries existing.

The IT industry still has been growing very rapidly over the last many years, despite the economic recession. The industry’s total turnover reached $13.7 billion in 2011, a 2.6 time increase in comparison with 2008, which means the 80 percent growth rate per annum.

The software industry, after witnessing the stable high growth rates of 35-40 percent per annum, has slowed down.

Nguyen Ngoc Binh, President of the Hanoi Technology University, a member school of the Hanoi National University, related a story about the recruitment of IT engineers to show the real qualification of Vietnamese IT school graduates.

In December 2000, the Director of the Labor Export Center, an arm of the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, affirmed at a national workshop on human resource development that Vietnam had very good IT engineers which can satisfy all the requirements from labor import countries.

Hearing that, a Malaysian business then asked to provide 40 software engineers.

There were more than 4,000 applications for the jobs, which made the Malaysian business feel excited. However, the business finally could recruit only four out of the 4,000 candidates.

“We then came to a conclusion that the Vietnamese candidates were weak in profession and soft skills due to the unreasonable training,” Binh said.

The lack of qualified IT workers is a big problem. However, it is even more problematic that the problem has not been improved over the last 12 years.

“We don’t have core technology, and we don’t have hardware industry, while we simply do the outsourcing for foreign partners,” Binh noted.

High hope put on new training models

Ha Than, General Director of Lac Viet Informatics Company, while emphasizing the urgent need of producing the workforce which can master the advanced technology and has the ability of working in the international environment, has suggested applying the franchising model in training, while waiting for the industrialization strategy in the IT sector gets clearer.

Lac Viet itself has become the official franchisee partner of New Horizons, the biggest independent IT trainer in the world.

Lac Viet – New Horizons Vietnam has the right to use all the documents and curricula which are the most advanced and the most updated in different fields, including cloud computing and mobility. 

“The curricula provide the skills needed by all institutions in the world. Learners can update the latest knowledge necessary for their works, while they can obtain international certificates of big international groups to be able to work globally,” Than said.

Dr. Tran Vu Binh from the Digital Technology Institute said the institute is drawing up the plan on a digital store where the knowledge is built up in topics, which would help improve the training. 

The system would be built on the Internet base which allows taking full advantage of the global network, thus bringing advanced education to every business and student at the lowest possible costs.

Tien Phong