Illustrative image (Photo: VNA) In its bi-annual report, the lender said: “Vietnam needs aworkforce with 21st century skills to grow. As the economy moves from beingdriven by low skill and low wage jobs in manufacturing and services towards amore innovation driven growth model built on higher value-added industries andservices, Vietnam’s workforce will need to attain higher level and more relevantskills.”
The Vietnamese Government’s Socio-economic DevelopmentStrategy for 2021-2030 says as much, aiming to use scientific, technological,innovative, and digitally transformative knowledge and build quality human resourcesas key drivers of higher productivity and future economic growth. To achievethese goals, Vietnam needs to reform its education system to improve quality andaccess, and thus provide the necessary skills to the population, it affirmed.
This edition also underlines transforming the highereducation system as the key to boosting the country’s productivity andachieving its development goals, in the context where the country re-emergesfrom the pandemic and into a challenging global environment.
The report’s co-author Dorsati Madani said that whileVietnam’s economic recovery had been relatively stable, not all sectorswitnessed the same situation.
The impact on workers and households during the crisis wasserious and lasting, with about 45% claiming lower incomes in December 2021than the previous year.
The impact of the pandemic is still present with businessesreporting broad-based labour shortages as of March 2022, which were felt moreacutely in services and manufacturing, and in the Ho Chi Minh City area.
This, in addition to growth slowdown or stagflation in mainexport markets, further commodity price shocks, continued disruption of globalsupply chains, or the emergence of new COVID-19 variants, are hinderingVietnam’s full recovery.
At the ceremony to release the report. (Photo: VNA) Vietnam’s human capital index is 0.69 out of a maximum of 1,the highest among the lower middle-income economies.
However, low skills relevance of the university graduatesput the country in the bottom third of the 140 countries listed in the 2018Competitiveness Index on skills relevance of university graduates.
A WB skills and enterprise survey published in 2019also said that 73% of sampled Vietnamese firms report difficulties inrecruiting employees with leadership and managerial skills, 54% withsocio-emotional skills, and 68% with job-specific technical skills.
Focusing on tertiary and higher education, the WB’s reportrecommends reforming the education system to improve quality and access, andthus provide the necessary skills to the population.
Reforms to Vietnam’s higher education system could helpsupport development objectives, the report says.
The increasing financial costs of pursuing higher educationand the perception of diminishing economic returns from pursuing highereducation have weakened demand.
While efforts to enhance the business environment arecrucial to enabling job creation, policymakers should also take steps to reduceskill-mismatches and improve the quality of Vietnam’s labour force.
Carolyn Turk, WB Country Director for Vietnam, said: “Tosustain economic growth at the desired rate, Vietnam needs to increaseproductivity by 2-3% every year.
“International experiences have shown that higher workerproductivity can be achieved by investing in the education system, as animportant part of a basket of investments and reforms. A competitive workforcewill generate much-needed efficiency for Vietnam in the long term.”
In its report, the World Bank forecast Vietnam’s GDP growth toexpand 7.5% in 2022 and 6.7% in 2023, with resilient manufacturing and a robustrebound in services serving as the driving forces for economic recovery./.
VNA
