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Mekong Delta in dire need of qualified workers
The Mekong Delta, a key economic region with many advantages in agriculture, forestry and the marine economy, houses many large industrial parks. However, it provides jobs for only 170,000 workers out of the total 10 million workers in the region because of their lack of skills.
A conference was held in Ho Chi Minh City recently, focusing on the scarcity of human resources in the region, which has impeded its development.
Those taking part in the event said that just 20 percent of industrial workers in the Delta have been trained vocationally and the number of college graduates and postgraduates makes up only four percent of the region’s population aged 20-24, much lower than the country’s average figure of 5.6 percent.
Most of the farmers in the Delta learn from experience rather than being trained professionally, say experts.
Even worse, most workers are trained in only a limited range of professions such as accounting, finance, business administration, information technology, foreign languages and law, while the region has a large demand for technically trained workers in farming, food processing, and seafoods. As a matter of course, many of them fail to meet employers’ demands.
The Mekong Delta’s grassroots vocational network in 2008 had a total of 312 vocational establishments, an increase of 130 from 2005, to provide training to more than 230,000 local people.
In fact, this network has trained only over 10 percent of the total trained workers, compared with the country’s average rate of 18 percent. Besides, many managers of vocational centres in the region have failed to meet professional knowledge standards for lack of managerial experience, said Nguyen Tien Dung, head of the General Department of Vocational Training under the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs. Lecturers at the vocational schools are also way off the mark in terms of both quality and quantity, he added.
Against that background, the General Department of Vocational Training has asked Mekong Delta provinces to develop or complete their projects to build their existing secondary vocational schools into vocational colleges while establishing four more secondary vocational schools, including one for ethnic minorities.
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