Tech industry choked by IT labour shortage

Hanoi (VNS/VNA) - Emerging tech companies are still struggling to recruit high quality IT engineers to feed Vietnam’s booming technology industry, despite a steady growth in graduates over the last few years.

Director of Vietnam Blockchain Corporation Do Van Long believed human resources were one of many issues causing problems for tech start-ups, regardless of their scale.

“A lack of high quality personnel has led to competition between firms to win over talent, causing start-ups to lose people to others making more attractive offers,” Long told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

“That can more or less decide the success of start-ups.”

According to a report by the Ministry of Information and Communications, in 2019, Vietnam has 149 out of 237 universities, or about 62 percent, offering tech majors like Information Technology (IT), Electronics and Telecommunications and Information Safety.

The total enrolment for IT-Communications majors last year reached 55,000, marking an increase of 12 percent compared to that of the previous year.

Such a number, however, is far from being able to meet the market demand for tech-savvy employees.

A report by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in 2018 forecasts that Vietnam will need up to 1 million IT engineers by 2020.

The communications ministry also sets the target of having 1.3 million IT workers by 2025, most of whom are highly skilled professionals.

Nguyen Anh Thi, Director of the Information Technology Park at Vietnam University, HCM City, said the country’s IT industry in the last decade gradually moved up the chain from doing mainly software outsourcing to participating in work of higher added value, like creating new products and services.

“It is a necessary development, as we can’t rely on cheap labour forever,” he said.

Many tech companies and groups have already prepared themselves for such change, but manpower remained one of their biggest challenges, Thi said.

Investing more on training engineers would be the only reasonable way to tackle the shortage, but it should not be only in higher education, said University of Natural Sciences vice principal Dr Tran Minh Triet.

“It’s not necessary to wait till undergraduate or post graduate levels to start teaching students information technology skills,” he said.

“Young students in high school or even secondary schools can approach and learn the basic foundations of IT to discover if it’s their passion and the very career they want to pursue in the future.”/.