Students practice at Lilama 2 International Technology College - Photo: TRONG NHAN
Inappropriate enrollment targets and lack of effective regulatory mechanisms are distorting Vietnam's labor market.
Enterprises are seriously lacking technical workers, while schools are massively training office graduates. The mismatch between real demand and training capacity causes a surplus of human resources where they are not needed and a shortage where they are needed, creating a long-lasting cycle of waste.
Unbalanced training from targets to social stereotypes
For many years, the Vietnamese labor market has been in a state of prolonged imbalance. Enterprises are seriously lacking technical workers and positions in direct operations, manufacturing, and maintenance; while there is a surplus of office and indirect personnel.
The economy needs many production and operational skills, but the education system produces too many white-collar graduates. The mismatch between training and demand has become one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back Vietnam’s productivity growth.
This imbalance stems from systemic causes, first of all the way training targets are managed.
Currently, quotas are determined mainly based on school capacity such as number of lecturers, classrooms and minimum administrative conditions, instead of based on actual human resource needs of the market.
Therefore, management, economics, and law majors with low training costs are easily expanded, while technical majors that require laboratories, workshops, and large investments are narrowed due to financial risks.
In the university autonomy mechanism, schools tend to open low-cost, easy-to-enroll majors, instead of focusing on technical majors that are essential for production but difficult to attract students and expensive to train.
Another important reason comes from social stereotypes about the profession. For many years, technical work has been associated with hard work, dust and risks, while management or office work has been seen as stable and clean.
Parents and students therefore flock to office jobs, causing the demand for education to deviate from the real labor demand. The Ministry of Education and Training can control the quota but cannot adjust social expectations, so when this mentality persists, the flow of students always goes against the needs of businesses.
In addition, the task of balancing human resources is spread across many ministries and each locality develops its own human resources strategy, causing data to be scattered and lacking a strong enough coordination mechanism.
Human resource forecasting therefore fails to keep pace with the pace of change in technology and global supply chains. While new sectors such as renewable energy, automation, smart logistics or semiconductors require large numbers of technical workers, the training system is slow to respond. The lag between training and using human resources is getting longer, making the structural mismatch more serious.
As a result, the economy has a surplus of graduates but a shortage of engineers and skilled workers. Businesses, especially in the processing and manufacturing industries, have to compete for technical workers, increasing labor costs and hindering production expansion.
Meanwhile, many students majoring in management, economics or finance cannot find jobs in their field of expertise, are forced to work in fields other than their field or accept low salaries, increasing unemployment among graduates and wasting training resources.
Productivity is also difficult to improve when the skilled workforce is lacking. Productivity in manufacturing depends largely on the ability to operate machinery, understand processes, troubleshoot and maintain equipment.
When there is a lack of people to take on these positions, businesses cannot upgrade technology, increase capacity or participate in stages with high added value, reducing Vietnam's competitiveness, especially in the context of ASEAN countries promoting technical training for future industries.
The imbalance in human resources also hinders the process of transforming the growth model. To move from a model based on cheap labor to one based on productivity and innovation, Vietnam needs a large enough high-skilled workforce. If training continues to deviate from real demand, the economy will be stuck in the low-value segment and find it difficult to move up the global value chain.
Resolve the imbalanced cycle
The most important solution is to build a highly reliable national human resource demand forecasting system that is regularly updated based on business data, technology trends, industrial park needs and regional development orientations.
This forecast must become a mandatory basis for allocating enrollment targets, helping to clearly determine how many automation engineers, IT technicians, logistics or nursing staff the market needs in each period, avoiding the situation of opening majors based on emotions or following trends.
Based on that forecast, it is necessary to assign targets that match market demand. Sectors with surplus human resources must drastically reduce targets and tighten conditions for opening sectors, while sectors with shortages of human resources must be prioritized for expansion and supported with investment to reduce training costs. When targets are closely aligned with real demand, the training system will gradually approach the human resource structure that the economy needs.
At the same time, there must be a mechanism to encourage learners to enter fields lacking human resources through targeted scholarships, tuition support, preferential credit, paid internship programs and models of the State or enterprises ordering training.
When studying engineering is both financially supported and has high employment opportunities, the flow of learners will happen naturally.
On the contrary, industries with surplus human resources need to be regulated by reducing quotas, raising output standards, increasing internship requirements and publicizing employment rates so that learners can choose the right market needs.
Ultimately, solutions are only effective when there is close coordination between the State, schools and businesses.
Enterprises need to participate in program development, internships and human resource orders; schools must innovate training towards practice; and the State plays the role of coordinator, data provider and financial support.
When the three subjects work together, human resources will be allocated more reasonably and contribute to improving productivity and increasing the competitiveness of the economy.
When quotas are assigned to meet demand, workforce forecasts are updated regularly, and learners are appropriately supported, the labor market will be regulated through both incentives and restrictions, bringing the workforce structure back into balance.
This is the path to help Vietnam escape the cycle of labor imbalance and form an economy that allocates human resources according to market signals, where training is closely linked to real development needs.
Source: https://tuoitre.vn/hoa-giai-vong-lap-mat-can-doi-nhan-luc-20251126111629234.htm
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