Labour training holds key to meet industrial zones’ demand

More than 2 million labourers are working at some 300 industrial parks and export processing zones nationwide, Dr. Bui The Duc, deputy head of the Party Central Committee’s Commission for Popularisation and Education said, noting that only 20% of the workers have professional skills and the remainder must be trained by enterprises after they are hired.

Experts at the conference highlighted that enterprises do not want to recruit trained workers as the quality of the workforce is not living up to their expectations.

Regarding vocational training quality in the past few years, Dr. Nguyen Hong Minh, Director General of the General Directorate of Vocational Training, underscored that the quality has been improved, which was demonstrated through the employment rate after graduation of 70 percent in 2015.

However, the vocational training sector still fails to meet the demand of the labour market as there is a shortage of connection and cooperation between enterprises and vocational training schools, he said.

In a bid to increase training quality, Minh recommended setting up in-house training centres at IPs and EPZs, increasing the involvement of enterprises in the training process as well as grouping the vocational training centres into high-quality and popular training schools.

According to Dr. Hoang Ngoc Vinh, head of the department of occupational education under the Ministry of Education and Training, soft skills are vital to developing high-quality labourers. He stressed that skill training should be privatised to increase the autonomy of the training centres in response to labour market requirements.