"I used to work in a food processing company in Japan," Thanh said. "I hoped to find a place at a Japanese company when I return here but there have been few opportunities. I had no other choice but to return to my old work."

The man said some people had advised him to return to Japan but he didn't want to live away from his family anymore.

"I just intended to go to Japan to learn some new skills so that I could find a better job when I returned home," he added. "But it seems very difficult. The same situation is happening to many other people in my hometown."

According to a report released recently by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), just a quarter of Vietnamese workers are able to find jobs after returning from Japan.

"As of June 2021, about 202,000 Vietnamese technical interns were studying in Japan, accounting for 63.8 percent of international trainees receiving vocational training in the country," the report said. "Most of them work in the fields of construction, agriculture, services and information technology.

However, compared to other countries in the region, the percentage of Vietnamese interns able to find a job soon after returning home is the lowest, at only 26.7 percent. Meanwhile, the figure in some countries including China, Thailand and the Philippines is more than 50 percent.

JICA commented that this was a "waste of human resources" that failed to "meet the programme's original purpose of transferring skills."

The JICA survey of over 300 Japanese enterprises and more than 40 employers in Vietnam found that it was difficult for interns returning to Vietnam from Japan to get a job because of "unsuitable work experience."

Some companies said the interns were just high school or secondary school graduates when applying for the internship programmes and could only do certain tasks that they were trained for in Japan. At some other companies, they mostly worked with machinery that was not available in Vietnam. Therefore, they faced difficulties finding a suitable job when returning home

Higher salary expectations and a lack of information on employment opportunities were another barrier preventing interns from getting a job soon after returning from Japan.

Explaining the situation, chairman of Hoang Long Construction Investment and Manpower Supply, Nghiem Quoc Hung, said that most Vietnamese people just want to seek short-term work with higher income when applying to work overseas while not paying attention to improving their skills for long-term job development.

"Many of them are just high school graduates and manual labourers who can only do simple work," he said. "So after finishing their work contracts in Japan, they can only return to do manual work in Vietnam."

Hung said that they would try to select better-qualified workers in the coming time, and at the same time work with Japanese enterprises operating in Vietnam to employ the returning workers.

“We're considering sending more workers with university degrees abroad," he said. "And we’ll help these workers acquire better technological understanding and experience from developed countries."

Deputy director of Esuhai Company, Nguyen Xuan Lanh, also proposed that the government should seek to expand labour co-operation with foreign countries in more fields, with more attention paid to higher-qualified workers.

"This group of workers will access technology from more developed economies and then help the country's economy when they return," Lanh said.

Deputy head of the Department of Overseas Labour, under the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, Nguyen Gia Liem said that there were some 500,000 Vietnamese people working in Japan at present. However, there were no statistics on the number of workers being able to find a job after returning home.

"Most of them have to find a job on their own after finishing their contracts in Japan," the official said. "There are no regulations that require any agencies to arrange jobs for these groups."

Source: Dtinews