Delegates to a seminar held in Ho Chi Minh City on June 28 raised concern about the lack of highly-skilled IT workforce in the country. 

According to recruitment agency Vietnamworks, the demand for IT workforce is high and will keep rising in the next few years. Job listings have also doubled in the recent three years. 

It is forecast that Vietnam needs 400,000 IT workers in late 2018, but there are only 250,000 engineers in the field at present. The number of IT jobs surges 47 percent annually but manpower only increases 8 percent. 

Nguyen Phuong Mai from Navigos Search said it is hard to seek highly-skilled managerial staff in the field. Amid the booming start-up movement, the rate of job-hopping is also high, resulting in the shortage of human resources or staff lacking management experience. 

In face of that, a number of firms have recruited students right after their probation while several recruitment agencies have trained staff for hire. 

Lam Quang Vu, deputy head of the Information Technology Faculty from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Natural Sciences, said the rate of early graduation in the field is high and forecast to be higher in the foreseeable future. 

The rate of IT students landing jobs following graduation nears 98 percent, 70 percent of them work in their field, mostly in non-State and foreign firms. 

At the event, the Vietnam Information Technology Outsourcing Alliance announced that the second international conference on Vietnam software outsourcing will take place in Ho Chi Minh City on October 19-20, attracting 150 multi-national and IT enterprises from 20 countries and territories worldwide, together with 250 software firms and 20 universities and institutes at home.

VNA