However, Navigos Group, which provides recruiting services, reported a decline in demand for workers in many business fields in the first months of the year, including in IT.

Nguyen Thi Thu Giang, deputy director of Navigos Search in the north, a member of Navigos Group, explained that in the Covid-19 and post-Covid periods, recruitment demand surged dramatically to serve growth in e-commerce and online transactions. However, demand has cooled recently.

Businesses now have concerns about cumbersome operation scale, while the number of new projects is on the decrease. 

In order to maintain effective business activities, technology firms are undergoing restructuring at different levels. When layoffs occur, many positions will no longer exist.

“E-commerce companies or companies related to e-commerce have downsized their staff. This is because they had grown too much recently,” Giang said.

“The firms developing software or solutions and technological products have not been affected because they have different business models. These businesses restructured because of the decrease in the number of projects in the overseas market,” she said.

Giang said that the recent events in the IT labor market won’t last a long time, but were necessary corrections after the market had developed too rapidly.

In fact, Navigos Search still receives requests for recruitment from businesses which consider the correction as an opportunity to attract qualified workers. 

The IT industry is changing every day and Vietnam lags behind other countries, so, in the long term, the industry will remain attractive to serve the digital transformation process in Vietnam.

“The IT labor market still lacks a high number of high-quality workers, especially ones in AI, data, and cybersecurity,” Giang said.

According to Navigos Search, Vietnam has 50,000 IT university graduates every year, but only 30 percent can satisfy the requirements set by enterprises. It is obvious that there are still great opportunities for the workers with high qualification, soft skills and foreign language skills.

Van Anh