Vietnam urged to reform IT training amid demand for workers

In VietNam Net Bridge's article "Vietnam urged to reform IT training amid demand for workers," the author briefly discusses the issue of insufficient educated and trained workers with the advent of Vietnam's "4.0 industrial revolution." Despite having its number of workers increase by 19 million from 35 million to 54.4 million in the past 20 years, Vietnam's productivity is still only a fraction of that of other Southeast Asian nations like Malaysia and Singapore. This industrial revolution has placed a large strain on employee training institutions and programs, as the number of IT engineers being trained from now to 2020 must increase by threefold in order to satisfy the projected demand for labor. According to VietnamWorks, Vietnam would need 1.2 million IT workers by 2020. If the number of IT workers in Vietnam were to increase by 8 percent each year, by 2020, Vietnam will lack 500,000 workers to fulfill this demand.

This article demonstrates Vietnam's desires to modernize rapidly yet lack of industrial infrastructure and both human and financial resources to accommodate these rapid changes. It seems Vietnam is trying to push ahead to become one of the economic leaders of Southeast Asia without realizing the repercussions of unsystematic industrialization. It should also be considered whether concentrating resources into a small elite group of people would exacerbate income and education gaps between urban and rural populations. Can a nation fully progress forward without bringing with it its marginalized yet crucial highlanders?