VietNamNet Bridge – The lack of a qualified labor force proves to be the biggest worry of many foreign information technology (IT) firms when they decide to establish software companies in Vietnam.

If everything goes smoothly, the 100 percent Hewlett-Packard (HP) owned company in Vietnam will be established in early 2011. The information has been confirmed by a high ranking officer of HP Vietnam with Dau tu newspaper. The officer said that HP is discussing the project with Vietnamese relevant ministries.

Of course, the administrative procedures prove to be the work that takes most of the time of HP Vietnam at this moment. However, the officer said that besides new administrative procedures, the labor force is now also the biggest worry for the new company. He said that HP expects reasonable policies on supporting the development of a labor force to be drawn up by Vietnamese agencies.

HP has every reason to worry about the lack of a qualified workforce. The Vietnam Software Association (Vinasa) admitted that Vietnam’s workforce for writing software is deficient and unqualified. Meanwhile, according to the Ministry of Information and Telecommunication, by 2020, Vietnam will need 528,000 officers in IT fields, including 148,000 officers in the software sector. Meanwhile, the training capability remains limited and it is estimated that only 400,000 officers can be trained. The noteworthy thing here is that 400,000 is the number of IT engineers to be created, while it does not mean that all the 400,000 can adapt to their jobs.

HP is not the only foreign investor in the IT field who has worries relating to the labor force when making investments in Vietnam. Several years ago, in order to settle the problem in the human resources, Intel set up a scholarship program to fund overseas studies in order to find talented engineers for its chip assembling and testing factory in the world, the biggest factory in the world. When operating at full capacity the factory will need some 4000 Vietnamese workers.

Several years ago, local newspapers quoted different sources as saying that Intel could only recruit a low number of workers it needed out of thousands of candidates. The candidates either exhibited problems in knowledge or did not have sufficient English skills.

The lack of qualified IT officers has caused a headache for domestic IT firms themselves. As the result, the enterprises have to find solutions to the problem before they can enjoy benefits from the support from the State.

The Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technologies (FPT), for example, has set up FPT University which has the chartered capital of 15 billion dong. The university specializes in training workers for FPT and for the market. However, the number of students trained by FPT University just meets 1/3 of the total demand of FPT.

Similarly, TMA, a software firm has set up a training center in order to provide a high quality labor force to the company and help increase the workforce for the software outsourcing industry of Vietnam.

Duc Huy