Fast growth of IT exacerbates shortage of skilled workers

IT development has contributed to positioning Vietnam on the world map, making it one of leading providers of IT services globally. Vietnam moved up to rank 88th among 193 countries in the United Nations E-Government Survey 2018. By the end of 2018, Vietnam’s adoption of the internet’s latest addressing scheme, known as IPv6, reached 23.78 percent, ranking it in 13th place in the world, sixth in Asia-Pacific, and second in ASEAN, with more than 13.2 million users. In addition, as many as 465,890 traditional domain names ending with “.vn” were developed.

Vietnamese network providers, such as Viettel, Vinaphone and Mobifone have installed dozens of 3G and 4G Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) nationwide, serving more than 98 percent of Vietnam’s population. A report by the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications (MIC) shows that total number of mobile subscribers in the first six months of 2019 reached 134.5 million.

The number of employees in the IT industry has reached 1.3 million, more than 300,000 in the hardware and electronics industry, and the rest in the software and digital content industry.

The IT industry yielded revenues of US$48.8 billion in the first half of 2019, an increase of 8.7 percent compared to a year ago. Of which, the hardware industry contributed US$43 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8.5 percent.

Most of the industry is foreign invested, with major corporations pouring billions of US dollars to build electronic component manufacturing factories in Vietnam, such as IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Toshiba and Samsung. Vietnam also has well-known IT businesses, such as Viettel, FPT and VNPT, and numerous creative startups.

Authorities need to devise mechanisms and policies to create favorable conditions for IT development, especially tax incentives in order to improve competitiveness and attract investment in the industry. Developing a labor force to meet the requirements of the IT surge is also underlined.