Vietnam needs to improve the quality of vocational training in order to ensure workers’ skills will be recognised in other ASEAN countries by 2015.

 Nguyen Tien Dung, head of the Vocational Training Department under the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MoLISA), says vocational training is considered a marketable product and its quality is classified accordingly.

In Germany, he notes, 80 percent of students who have finished secondary education take vocational training courses and the remainder go to college or university.

In recent years, Vietnam has expanded its vocational training network and increased the scale of training. The number of people taking vocational training courses has reached 32 percent and mechanisms have been created to ensure the best possible conditions for those living in rural areas.

Around a million workers are trained each year for the industrial, agricultural and services sectors with international cooperation growing at both national and grassroots levels.

However, vocational training in Vietnam has not yet made any major breakthroughs as expected.

MoLISA Deputy Minister Nguyen Ngoc Phi says most Vietnamese students dream of entering college or university at any cost while millions of graduates remain jobless. The reason is many businesses are unable to recruit them due to financial constraints and want to train workers themselves.

Dung admits that the quality of vocational training in Vietnam is still lower than in other countries to meet the growing demand for human resources in specific sectors.

Vietnam plans to have 190 vocational training centres by 2015, including 26 of national standard, responsible for training around 2.9 million workers each year as from 2016 to 2020. It also expects to have 51,000 qualified vocational trainers, as well as 23.5 million workers by 2015 and 34.4 million by 2020.

The main focus of these centres will be on coordinating with businesses to train workers at their request.

To this end, Phi emphasizes, it is urgent to improve the quality of vocational training to provide suitable workers for both domestic and foreign businesses.

Hans Juergen Beerfelt, State Secretary of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Co-operation and Development, shares Germany's experience in developing young human resources, saying that the shortage of qualified workers is a human barrier to national development growth.

He insists that Vietnam must improve the quality of vocational training to meet business demand for practical skills on the part of workers in specific areas.

(VOV)