Vietnamese IT workers may be offered salaries of VND500 million ($21,600) per year but many businesses will still be unable to find suitable personnel, according to a fourth quarter report on the IT market in Vietnam conducted by TopDev, a recruitment network and mobile and IT ecosystem.

Most employers have to train new employees, who have experience in working on projects related to IT, according to TopDev.

Vietnam will be short of 90,000 IT workers in 2019 despite increasing salaries and benefits, then 100,000 by 2020 and 150,000 by 2021.

The top 5 highest salary programming languages are Python, .NET, PHP, JAVA and C ++, of which C ++ still ranks first with a monthly salary of up to VND27.6 million ($1,185). Programmers working in Ho Chi Minh City often earn higher incomes than those in other areas.

Monthly salary offerings in Vietnam

Many startups in Vietnam have developed projects related to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the last five years, which have created extraordinary value for the technology industry.

Thanks to this, the salary of AI engineers is expected to increase sharply in the coming years but human resources will remain an issue for many businesses.

Recruitment depends heavily on unofficial relationships. According to TopDev’s figures, up to 58 per cent of employers seek candidates through referrals and only 51 per cent recruit through official channels.

The rapid development of many new technology trends has opened up better opportunities for programmers in Vietnam but also creates many obstacles for employers without proper recruitment methods.

Many businesses are now looking to new recruitment methods with a longer-term vision, such as employer branding, to create influence and spread their image among potential applicants.

One of the solutions to enhance IT human resources in general and AI in particular is the combination of university training and enterprise recruitment.

Information for the report was collected from data on over 100,000 jobs in 2018 and from more than 15,000 respondents.

VN Economic Times