According to the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC), Vietnam will need 1.2 million workers in the IT industry by 2020, but it may lack 500,000. 

The shortage is everywhere, from state agencies to private and foreign invested firms, from big to small companies.

A report shows that even with 80,000 IT workers produced by training establishments in 2017 and 2018, Vietnam will still lack 70,000 workers by the end of this year. 

In HCMC alone, 16,200 IT workers each year will be needed in the next five years.

According to Tran Anh Tuan, deputy director of the HCMC Center for Labor Demand Forecasting and Labor Market Information, since Vietnam has signed a lot of FTAs and joined the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), the human resources demand is expected to rise sharply with over 6 million jobs to be created.

IT is one of the industries which suffer most from labor shortage, especially for new fields in network security, mobile application programming, 3D game design programming, visual effects design and 3D animation programming.

A representative of IT University, a member school of the HCMC National University, said IT firms now tend to place orders for workers with training establishments. Students are offered jobs when they are still at school.

Employers complain that Vietnamese candidates in the IT industry are not good enough and new graduates need retraining at work. “However, we still have to accept them, because the labor shortage has become too serious,” the director of a private firm said.

According to Tran Quang Anh from the Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology (PTIT), the weakest point of IT graduates doesn’t lie in professional knowledge, but in foreign language skills. This prevents them from accessing job opportunities from both Vietnamese and foreign companies.

Huynh Quoc Thang, CEO of 789.VN, complained that it is very difficult to find suitable workers, because most candidates don’t have work experience. 

Most of the 100 engineers working at the company graduated from prestigious universities, but they still needed retraining when joining the company’s staff, especially in English and team-working skills.

Paul Espinas from VietnamWorks said the short labor supply has placed big difficulties for enterprises, while the IT labor market is in danger of becoming chaotic because of the scramble for each other’s workers.

He thinks Vietnam needs to draw up a national strategy on training workers for the IT industry. 

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