Vietnam needs 1 million workers in information technology and digital content creation but now there are only 300,000 people in this field, pointing to a need to improve the quality of education and tailor it to the need of companies.

Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam made the statement at the ceremony to open the second phase of F-Ville software village (F-Ville 2) in Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park on February 13.

On the same day, Dam also visited FPT University. In a talk with students, Dam said that information technology is playing a more and more important role in the development of the country, especially in the context of the fourth industrial revolution. He added that the Vietnamese IT sector has a lot of potential not yet fully realised. 

“Vietnam has a young population. There are governmental programmes to grow the sector, but Vietnam only ranks 80-90th in the world in its deployment of e-government. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese IT services market’s size is $3 billion, compared to $943 billion globally,” he said.

One of the reasons, according to Dam, is that IT human resources “are few in number and weak in quality.” 

“University education has not met companies’ requirements,” Dam said.

Besides improving education, Dam said Vietnam also needs to start a radical reform of IT policies. 

“Vietnam cannot become strong in IT when our 3G is slow and 4G is only taking off, while other countries have already stopped using 2G. Vietnam cannot take advantage of the fourth industrial revolution if it does not have strong tax and finance policies to facilitate company growth and if it does not eliminate bottlenecks that send all start-ups to register in Singapore and the US,” he said.

He said that besides FPT building the software village, in order to turn Vietnam into a country strong in IT, many other companies will have to get involved by seriously investing in IT too, to turn Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park into one of the world’s software technology centres.

VIR