Where have all the skilled laborers gone? (To better-paying jobs.)
HANOI, Vietnam — Life is pretty good for the members of the Hanoi Young Business Association.
The Vietnamese economy is booming, salaries and profits are rising, recent WTO accession has been a big step in the country’s increasingly open and internationally integrated market economy, and the quality of life is continually improving. Twenty years ago, the city residents’ main form of transportation was the bicycle. Now, everyone has a motorscooter, and the streets are a chaotic mess of motorists swerving between lanes, ignoring traffic lights, and constantly honking their horns as warnings to pedestrians to keep a move on it, buddy. (And we are told that this is nothing compared to the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City).
But Dang Duc Dzung, the vice chairman of the Hanoi Young Business Association, sees one huge problem already plaguing the fast-growing IT sector, on which Vietnam has high hopes and already significant success. There just aren’t enough skilled workers to fill the jobs.
“A few years ago, the biggest constraints were financial capital,” Dzung said. Now, with international and local banks lending money, that’s not a problem. The problem is finding people, especially when Vietnam has a goal of 500,000 private companies by 2010. It’s 2007, and there are only 280,000, he said. “The education system cannot produce enough talent,” he said.
And a company like Nguyen Quoc Hung’s Thanh Nam Co., which supplies and services office equipment from Xerox and Canon to the Vietnamese market, finds itself losing 5% of its skilled workforce each year and having to recruit 15% to replace the losses and expand.
Hung’s company has seen a 12-to-15% increase this year in skilled-worker wages in order to keep up with the market and keep more of his staff from jumping to other businesses. Before, he could recruit from universities. Now, he has to lower his standards and recruit from technical colleges.
Even better days could be ahead if they can just find the manpower.