Vietnamese students need to learn more math

There are nearly 300 universities and junior colleges which provide training in information technology (IT). Of these, HCMC National University every year produces 2,000 IT engineers as estimated by Vu Hai Quan, vice president of the school, and head of AILab. Vietnam has 30,000 IT majors who graduate each year.

Despite the high number of graduates, concerns still exist. “Unfortunately, the high number of graduates is not associated with the high quality of graduates,” Quan said.

Ho Tu Bao, head of John von Neumann Institute, a leading expert in AI, said the workforce in IT and AI has increased rapidly in recent years, but Vietnam still lacks good specialists.

“At big workshops on AI, there are very few reports by Vietnamese in Vietnam. There are only reports by overseas Vietnamese,” Bao said.

What worries Quan the most is that the number of students undergoing intensive training in IT has been decreasing in the last five years. 

Students tend to finish school and find jobs rather than continuing to study in-depth at school. Even IT lecturers do extra jobs for money.

“This may bring high risk, because schools will lack lecturers with enthusiasm and knowledge,” he said.

The same problem is occurring at the Hanoi University of Natural Sciences. Nguyen Thi Minh Huyen, vice dean of Math & Informatics, said her faculty receives a lot of orders in AI from enterprises that lack a well trained labor force to implement projects.

“Students now don’t want to spend much time on studying, but just want to find jobs,” she explained.

“Many students take jobs when they are in third year. They don’t have time to study to have good foundation for AI research,” she said.

Tran Viet Hung, founder of GotIt!, said that in order to specialize in AI, university graduates need further training, because we a gap exists between their abilities and businesses’ requirements.

Asked how to increase the number of IT engineers and improve their qualifications, Bao mentioned Seattle, which has many large technology firms. 

The city needs 3,500 IT officers a year, while local schools can produce only 300 new graduates each year. As a result, businesses have to seek staff from other localities. However, the universities there do not intend to increase the number of students they train.

Bao said that Vietnam must not try to produce as many IT workers as possible, either, and should not ignore training quality, which must be improved. 

Regarding the training curricula, Bao said in theoretical training, Vietnamese students need to learn more math, because the requirements in data processing will increase.

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Mai Thanh