Deloitte has estimated that Vietnam will have 4 million IoT operating devices by the end of 2023, while Research and Market believes the Vietnamese IoT market value will reach $8.5 billion by 2027.

Despite the growth, the Vietnamese IoT market is still inferior to many other countries, which can be seen in the low IoT connectivity rate per head.

One of the reasons is a lack of workers who have qualifications in IoT development. IoT engineers, especially new university graduates, are not paid well.

In Vietnam, the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) is the leading university in producing staff for technology fields, including IoT.

A survey conducted in 2022 of new graduates majoring in electronics and telecommunications found that 57.5 percent of new engineers took jobs in fields related to electronics and computing engineering, which have close relations to the development of IoT systems.

A report on the jobs of new graduates found that 50 percent of electronics and telecommunications chose jobs in the software sector. Most of them took jobs developing websites and apps instead of developing core technologies related to overall systems. 

Nguyen Duc Minh from HUST commented that this is a problem in the Vietnam’s IoT community.

As a result, Vietnam lacks IoT workers with a systems view. The majority of the work of IoT engineers in Vietnam relates only to a small part of the overall system instead of  IoT use in developing new products. 

A study found that 50 percent of engineers trained in IoT have a monthly salary of VND4-10 million. The very best new IoT engineers have monthly salaries of VND29-30 million, but they account for a very small proportion.

The average income of junior IoT engineers in Vietnam is VND10-13 million, a modest figure compared with the income of engineers in other technology fields.

Dao Thao from Vconnex said that the potential of IoT use in Vietnam is great. However, from the perspective of a businesses specializing in researching and making smarthome equipment and solutions, Thao believes that Vietnam lacks high-quality IoT workers.

She said that this poses a challenge, noting that Vietnam’s tech firms need engineers with deep knowledge and systems thinking. To solve the problem, Vietnam needs more facilities that teach IoT as well as more programs that produce highly qualified IoT engineers.

Trong Dat