Viet Nam will need an additional 400,000 information technology (IT) personnel by 2020, heard a forum on information and communications technology (ICT) human resources held in Ha Noi on Saturday.

According to the Ministry of Education and Training, 37.5 per cent of universities and colleges in Viet Nam offer ICT majors. Each year, there are about 50,000 IT graduates.

On the other hand, the statistics of the Ministry of Information and Communications show the number of job openings in the software and IT industry increases by about 30,000 every year.

It is forecast by 2020, the recruitment demand of enterprises will be 1 million IT personnel. Job website Vietnamworks also predicts that, by 2020, Viet Nam will lack some 400,000 IT workers and each year, Viet Nam will need 78,000 new IT employees.

Despite a huge demand for ICT human resources, Phi Anh Tuan, vice president of HCM City Computer Association, said domestic IT training programmes have not met demand, especially for high quality engineers. Only about 27 per cent of IT workers can meet the requirements, the rest need additional training for a minimum of three months.

IT students face many challenges such as the rapid speed of technology development; AI; IoT; Blockchain.

Therefore, IT students need to improve regularly for the demand of high quality of IT human resources and also need co-ordination to help improve the quality of IT human resource training, Tuan suggested. — VNS