Vietnamese labors in FDI companies weak at soft skills

The weaknesses of Vietnamese labors in foreign direct investment (FDI) companies lie in soft skills including teamwork, communication and adaptation to changes and new situations, said a recent survey. Vietnam's Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs and Vietnam Institute of Labor Science and Social Affairs (ILSSA) co-held a conference in capital Hanoi on Thursday to publish survey results on labor skill demands among FDI companies in Vietnam. Nguyen Thi Lan Huong, head of ILSSA, said at the conference that the survey was carried out among workers in 100 FDI companies in three sectors of consumer goods, electronics and assembly of automobiles and motorcycles from six provinces and cities across Vietnam. The survey showed a warning tendency in Vietnam's labor market when some FDI enterprises seek their needed human resources from competing enterprises, instead of investing to train labors. This can create an unfair competition on wages, said Huong. Current strategies of recruiting and using labors among most FDI companies in Vietnam are still leaning towards taking advantages of unskilled labors at low cost. This will hamper the business development of these FDI companies in the future when they want to invest into more complicated technologies to produce more value-added products in Vietnam, state-run news agency VNA reported. Delegates at the conference discussed measures to strengthen skills for Vietnamese labors to meet with future demands of foreign investors. These measures included linkages between universities, colleges and FDI companies to build training programs to ensure consistency between training and market demand as well as developing soft skills at all levels of education. FDI companies have contributed more and more to promoting Vietnam's economic development, creating jobs and taking the lead of technology and management innovations, said the survey, adding that FDI companies in Vietnam are not affected by the economic crisis with over half of surveyed companies saying that they are expanding business and only 5 percent suffering from losses