>> Gov’t encourages human resource development plan

Despite a lot of difficulties, the demand for human resources was still very high in 2010 and is expected to keep increasing in 2011.

Demand is on the rise

According to the Ho Chi Minh City Center of Forecasting Manpower Needs and Labor Market Information (FALMI), in 2010, Ho Chi Minh City needed 234,000 workers, the majority of whom (56.41 percent) were unskilled workers for manufacturing sectors like garment, plastics, packing, fine arts, interior decoration and electronics-telecom.

Regarding the high-ranking personnel, Nguyen Thi Van Anh, Managing Director of Navigos Search, said that the demand has been increasing, especially in the fields of consumer goods, banking, production, mechanical engineering and construction. The jobs that needed the highest number of officers were finance-accountancy, sale, marketing, information and administration officer.

Forecasting the demand for 2011, Tran Anh Tuan, Deputy Director of FALMI, said that in 2011, Ho Chi Minh will need 265,000 workers, including 45 percent of unskilled workers, 20 percent of workers with university degree and 35 percent of workers who finished vocational schools.

Meanwhile, the demand for high ranking personnel is believed to increase in 2011. Ngo Dinh Duc, General Director of Le&Associates, said that the national economy will not be prosperous in the first months of the year. However, in order to prepare for the plan to “gear up” by the mid year, many companies will have to well prepare their human resources.

Duc thinks that the human resources demand will increase by 20-30 percent in 2011, while consumer goods and finance and banking would still be the hottest sectors.

Representative from Towers Watson Vietnam said that in the next 12 months, businesses will still continue making investment in the workforce management. They will pour more money to recruitment projects, and pay more to their employees.

The supply and demand imbalance

Analysts have anticipated a big problem in the labor market in 2011 – the imbalance of supply and demand. The number of university graduates accounts for 53.2 percent of the total workers, while untrained workers just account for 0.55 percent. Meanwhile, the demand for personnel with university degree is just 11.09 percent, and for untrained workers 56.41 percent.

According to Tuan, though many workers have completed training courses, they still do not meet the requirements of the jobs, which explains why many university graduates still cannot find employment.

It is expected that the industries which use high numbers of workers will have to face the serious shortage of labor after Tet. The shortage may be even more serious than in previous years, since the salaries workers get are not high enough to compensate for the high inflation rate and the escalating goods prices.

Ho Xuan Lam, Deputy Head of the Labor Management Division under the Ho Chi Minh City Management Board for Export Processing Zone and Industrial Zone (Hepza), said that in 2011, Hepza will need 50,000 lworkers, but it foresees that it will not be able to recruit enough . “Many workers return to their home villages to celebrate Tet and they never return,” he said.

Salaries will be increasing

Talentnet, a human resource company, has found out from its survey that in 2010, the salaries increased by 12.4 percent, or 0.2 percent higher than the salary increase of the year before. The salary increases could be seen in most companies.

In 2009, 13 percent of polled companies said they did not increase salaries for staff, while the figure was 0.79 percent only in 2010.

Meanwhile, according to Towers Watson Vietnam, the average salary increase was 12.8 percent, the highest increase over the last seven years.