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Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, in his report to the NA, said that the government creating as favourable conditions as possible for the people to find jobs with decent income had been the core of democracy and justice in the society. The state spends most of its budget money in generating more jobs, providing more vocational training and helping more small and medium sized businesses to provide more jobs to the people.
Vietnam had many social and economic achievements in the past few years, with vocational training being one of these achievements. Training workers for the local job market and sending skilled workers to work overseas meet the annual plan. During the 2001-2005 period, more than 7.54 million new jobs were created, a growth rate of 23.6% compared to that of the 1996-2000 period. This means each year, at least 1.5 million new jobs are created, with 2006 figure reaching 1.6 million.
Thanks to these efforts, the unemployment rate in urban areas dropped to 5.3% in 2005 from 6.4% in 2000. Rural labour used increased from 73.9% in 2000 to 80.7% in 2005. The drop of unemployment rate in urban areas and the increase of labour time used in rural areas indicated a sustainable trend of socio-economic development in the country.
Vocational training has been the first step in the roadmap of job creation for each labourer. The country now has a network of 1,688 vocational training units, including 236 vocational training schools and 404 vocational training centres. More than six million people had received some forms of vocational training from 2001 to 2006, with more than one million of them being provided with long term skills and five million of them with short term skills.
In addition to state run vocational training places, more than five hundred vocational training places were established and run by other economic entities. Despite having many difficulties, the State had spent a considerable amount of money to invest in vocational training centres and schools to enable them to provide sophisticated training to meet the increasing demand of the job market. As a result, Vietnamese workers have proven their skills by winning many awards in ASEAN competition, improving the reputation of Vietnamese workers in the world labour market. Thanks to intensive and appropriate training, skilled labourers account for 27% of the country’s total labour force.
Generating jobs for the local market was given special attention, with many national and regional job creation programmes being tailored and set up to meet the specific demand for each locality as well as the demand of the national job market. As the country joins the WTO, there would be more opportunities and challenges for the local job market, with many businesses on the brink of bankruptcy due to poor management and tough competition, meaning there would be more job cuts and losses.
To take the opportunity and deal with the challenges, the job pattern is shifted to creating more jobs in agriculture and rural areas, in order to provide jobs for about 25 million jobs in this sector while adding hundred of thousands of new jobs in this sector every year. Jobs in the service and industrial sectors will be the important factors in changing the jobs pattern to meet the demand of industrialisation and modernisation, maintaining the growth rate for GDP between 7.5% and 8% per year. These sectors keep jobs for about 19 million people and add hundreds of thousands of new jobs each year to the job market.
Due to its efforts in vocational training, Vietnam has become a quality provider of labour in the region and the world. The country now has more than 400,000 workers working in 40 countries and territories around the world, including demanding markets such as Japan, Taiwan and Korea. Each year, these workers send home more than US $1.6 billion, improving the lives of millions of their relatives at home and helping create more jobs in the local market.
From 2007 on, Vietnam works its best to maintain the existing job market share in Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan and Korea and will expands its share in more demanding markets such as Australia, Canada, US and other regions. The plan for 2007 would be improving the skills of existing labour force, creating 1.6 million new jobs and sending 80,000 labourers to work overseas. To meet this target, the government, the society and each family will have to work hard, especially in providing appropriate training to labourers.
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