A Vietnamese worker working in a factory in Taiwan 

The ministry’s Overseas Labourer Management Department said 106,840 workers went overseas last year, with Taiwan taking 62,000.

Department director Tong Hai Nam said growing demand for domestic labour by Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines had curbed the available overseas worker pool in those countries, offering "a great chance for Vietnamese workers” to fill vacancies, with average earnings of VND10-15m a month in Taiwan jobs.

"Taiwan labour demand is on the rise," Nam said.

Deputy minister Nguyen Thanh Hoa, said the ministry was seeing strong demand growth for Vietnamese workers and "will focus on administrative reform" to send more workers abroad.

Nguyen Ngoc Quynh, the director of the department, said demand in the Japanese market has sharpening on highly skilled trainees from Vietnam working in fields such as design, engineering and nursing, and offering average monthly wages of VND34-40m.

Hoa, said the ministry wanted this year to find more markets with higher incomes for local workers in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and was continuing to negotiate with Thailand, Angola, Laos, Russia, Belarus and Germany to take more workers.

Nam said workers going to fellow Asean member-countries could access eight fields -- accounting, architecture, dentistry, medicine, nursing, engineering, transportation and tourism.