Businesses and universities cooperate in training programs

Vo Dinh Bay, IT Dean of Hutech, said his faculty is working with some IT firms to increase practice hours for students and upgrade training quality. However, he said that the connection is just based on mutual benefits.

“We survey the human resources demand at enterprises and then plan suitable training curricula and cooperation programs,” Bay said.

However, he said the curricula cannot be designed in a way to fully satisfy enterprises’ needs, because lessons must fit the Ministry of Education and Training’s framework for training programs. This is a problem when cooperating with enterprises.

Bay said that current regulations are hindering the interaction between enterprises and schools, including ones on sending education experts to enterprises and company CEOs to schools as visiting lecturers.

Dang Ngoc Hai, director of Axon Active Vietnam, also thinks there should be a specific mechanism to create more substantial interactions between school and business.

In order to have successful training, for example, enterprises need to commit to maintain resources and ensure the quality of training courses.

“Scheduling training plans for both businesses and schools’ convenience is really difficult, with the lack of professionalism and commitment from students, and the lack of skills for presentation and foreign languages,” Hai said. 

To solve this problem, joint training programs need to be more practical and provide useful knowledge to students. Students should be required to develop products and defend their projects before graduation.

Vu Anh Tuan, secretary general of the HCMC Informatics Association, suggested setting up a mechanism to encourage businesspeople to work as lecturers at training establishments, and encourage university lecturers to set up their own businesses. This will allow lecturers to have more practical experience that serves teaching at school.

Currently, awards are given every year to IT firms to honor their achievements and contribution to the country’s IT industry development. Tuan believes that IT firms’ support for training should also be counted when giving awards.

A report found that Vietnam will need 411,000 workers in the IT industry in the next five years. At present, Vietnam lacks 80,000 workers in the field each year, while only 32,000 IT major students finish school.

Not only IT firms but enterprises in manufacturing and other sectors also need high-quality IT workers to implement plans on technology upgrading.

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