Employment expert Le Quang Trung, believes the highest proportion of people inthe workforce will be in personal services and sales (31.62 percent) followedby workers in manual job (26.5 percent) then skilled craftsmen (12.47 percent)and technical workers (12.42 percent next year.
Trung, Deputy Director of the Employment Department, at the Ministry of Labour,Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA) was speaking at an online discussionorganised by the Government Portal (chinhphu.vn) in Hanoi on December 28.
He said recruitment plan for 2019 would continue to increase.
Answering online questions, Trung said with the positive shift of the economy, Vietnam’swas forecast to continue growing in 2019. The labour market would be shiftedwith high-skilled workers replacing simple labourers, meaning quality wouldimprove.
According to the trend of Industry 4.0, some industries with great demand,(including technology) are developing at high speed, increasing the demand forstaff.
But jobs such as printing technician, machinery assemblers and operators,irrigation engineers, construction engineers, food processors will be difficultto fill.
At the discussion “Labour and employment in the context of the FourthIndustrial Revolution”, Trung said with the general development of thecountry’s economy, the labour market had been developing towards modernisationand market orientation.
“The legal framework, and labour market policies have been gradually improved,”he said.
“As a result, labourers’ income and wages improved, labour productivity andcompetitiveness of the workforce also increased.”
Thanks to the implementation of new policies and mechanisms promoting jobcreation and market development, the MoLISA reported as of September 2018, theunemployment rate at urban areas was 3.1 percent (against the target of below 4percent proposed by socio-economic development plan).
The proportion of workers in the agriculture-forestry-fishery sector decreasedfrom 50 percent in 2010 to 38.3 percent in 2018.
However, Vietnam’s labour market still has challenges, according to Le QuangTrung.
Labourers mainly work in agricultural areas with low productivity. Basically, Vietnamis still a market with a surplus of agricultural and rural labourers.
The low job quality has reflected on the low productivity, the high rate oflabourers working in vulnerable areas (56.5 percent of labourers in the countryis working in informal jobs).
With low income from employment, a large proportion of labourers do not haveaccess to social insurance, unemployment insurance and occupational safetypolicy.
At present, only 29 percent of the labour force in working-age is covered withcompulsory social insurance.
The country has nearly 600,000 enterprises, of which 90 percent aresmall-and-medium enterprises.
About 96 percent of small-and medium enterprises are employing under 30employees, 88 percent employing less than 10 employees.
The production size of an enterprise was small and it was certain that itscapacity was limited, as a result, the labour productivity, workers’ income waslow, and their jobs were hardly sustainable, Trung said. - VNS/VNA