On November 1, in Hanoi, the workshop "Decoding the paradox of the technology industry: Eagles knock on the door but human resources are closed" was organized by Aptech International Programmer Training System in collaboration with Multiple Intelligences Inter-level School (MIS).

The event highlighted for the first time the current situation when Vietnam, despite being an attractive destination for technology giants such as Apple, NVIDIA, and Intel, still faces difficulties in providing high-quality IT human resources. Accordingly, the speakers analyzed the causes of the shortage of human resources to meet the requirements of large corporations and discussed solutions to improve the training system, in order to prepare the workforce to welcome the wave of international technology investment.

According to statistics from TopDev - Vietnam's leading IT recruitment platform, the labor market in this field is facing a double "shortage" problem: shortage in quantity and quality of human resources. Forecasts show that by 2024, Vietnam will need 500,000 IT workers, but this number currently only meets about 300,000, leading to a shortage of up to 200,000 people.

Recruitment demand in the IT industry is expected to continue to increase in the coming years, especially in highly specialized positions such as technology engineers, technicians, and programmers. The reason for this situation is the rapid growth of the IT industry along with the shortage of well-trained human resources.

Mr. Ngo Thanh Hien, Chief Technology Officer of IBM Vietnam, said that when IBM opened its software outsourcing center in Vietnam in 2002, despite the expectation of increasing the number of programmers, the reality was that finding skilled programmers was a big challenge. After more than a decade, the number of programmers has increased but the quality problem still exists, especially communication and teamwork skills.

Assessing the quality of IT human resources, Mr. To Hong Nam said that there is currently a paradox: Many IT graduates are still unemployed while businesses cannot find human resources to meet their needs. To solve this problem, he proposed implementing IT training right from high school level and even earlier, so that students are equipped with a foundation of knowledge about STEM, programming and logical thinking early on.

At the conference, delegates also focused on the IT training model in developed countries, in which the curriculum is reasonably distributed between levels, to help students have an IT foundation before entering university. For example, in the high school education program in the US and UK, IT is required with knowledge streams on technology applications and computer science, helping students become familiar with basic programming technologies and determine their career direction in the IT field early.