Over the past few years, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the northern Bac Ninh province have made a good contribution to the development of local industry but they have also faced many difficulties in terms of human resources and sources of capital, the Vietnam Economic News said.

According to Deputy Director of Bac Ninh provincial Department of Industry and Trade Ta Dang Doan, strong attractiveness of the large scale enterprises and foreign-invested enterprises has made it difficult for the local SMEs, especially those businesses in Bac Ninh’s craft villages to attract more manpower.

To remove difficulties for these enterprises, through industry promotion programmes, Bac Ninh province has taken a number of measures to supply human resources to the enterprises.

In 2013, the Bac Ninh provincial Industry Promotion and Consultancy Development Centre organised many vocational training classes to provide high-skilled labour force to enterprises operating in fields of export sewing, fine art furniture, home carpentry and rattan, bamboo production.

The centre coordinated with Bac Ninh Carpet Sewing JSC and Thuan Thanh International Fashion JSC to organise 10 industrial sewing training classes for 300 labourers. It also coordinated with the provincial Economic and Industry and Trade departments, enterprises and cooperatives to organise 20 vocational training classes for 600 rural labourers in the province.

In the 2008-2012 period, Bac Ninh industry promotion also spent 12.435 billion VND out of the total 19.953 billion VND for the whole period on vocational training activities. The training classes were mainly in form of short-term training and on the job training for labourers in the areas of traditional handicrafts like ceramic, fine art furniture, home carpentry and picture embroidery.

Notably, Bac Ninh industry promotion has always organised vocational training classes with collaboration among three parties: administrative agencies, enterprises and labourers. Of those, enterprises are subjects who employ and consume product for labourers. In return, they can have a high quality human resource. The labourers, meanwhile, can live on their trained occupations. In reality, as many as 70 percent of the trained labourers were employed and the rest worked at their homes with incomes ranging from 1.5-3.5 million VND a person a month.

Apart from efforts to provide high quality human resources for the businesses, over the past years Bac Ninh industry promotion has also supported a range of SMEs and businesses in craft villages to invest in new technologies. Over the past five years, Bac Ninh industry promotion has spent 3.425 billion VND to assist 44 businesses and production facilities to built new technical models, and apply modern technologies into production.

The active and efficient support of the local industry promotion activities in recent times have helped provincial SMEs gradually remove difficulties in terms of the workforce and help them boost production and increase revenues.

In particular, according to Ta Dang Doan, industry promotion activities also promoted the establishment of small handicraft cooperatives and enterprises and created more jobs for workers in rural areas thereby boosting the development of the provincial industry.-VNA