Nguyen Phuong Anh, a third-year student of the Hanoi Foreign Trade University, said it is not a too difficult work to write an application for job. “I believe that students don’t know how to compile documents simply because they are not taught soft skills at schools,” she said.

Anh still has not finished school, but she has a part-time job in her training major. “I have learned a lot at my job. There are many things you can learn when you are at work, which you cannot learn when you are at school,” she said.

Do Duc Thanh, deputy director of Yamguchi Vietnam, said that the majority of new university graduates lack soft skills because of the training followed by schools.

“Students at Vietnamese schools cannot learn to accumulate knowledge, while they don’t have clear purposes for their study and work,” he said, adding that students would be better to approach businesses to learn.

Some people say that university graduates are so unprepared for work that they don’t even know how to fill out job applications and compile official documents.

Nguyen Hoang Anh, a lecturer of the Foreign Trade University, confirmed that many bachelor’s degree graduates don’t know how to write official documents because ‘they never had to do this in the past’.

Anh noted that the curricula at both general school and university don’t include lessons on teaching students to write official documents. 

“Students just go to shops to buy printed forms for curriculum vitae, while they don’t think they need to write CVs themselves to impress employers,” he said.

A recent survey by MOLISA showed that more than 13 percent of university graduates have to undergo retraining, nearly 40 percent have to be coached at work and 41 percent need time to adapt to their jobs.

Anh thinks that it is a necessary thing to teach soft skills to students, but in Vietnam’s conditions, it is difficult.

When learning teamwork skills, for example, students should be put in groups of five members and each lecturer can manage 5-6 groups. However, in Vietnam’s conditions, there are 80-100 students in every class.

Some lecturers have suggested organizing one additional internship period for university students when they begin the second-year study. 

However, Anh said weak internships will not help much. “Very few students can work in the true sense of the word,” she said. “They are just given some documents to read.”

A fourth-year student at Hanoi National University complained that it is very difficult to find enterprises and organizations who accept interns. 

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