Tourism human resources: mismatching supply & demand

The Vietnamese tourism industry is still seriously short of trained human resources, though the sector has increased and expanded its training.

This remark was repeated by many delegates at the National Conference on Demand-oriented Tourism Human Resources Training held in Hanoi recently.

A draft Vietnam tourism development strategy for the period from now to 2020 defines the tourism industry as a spearhead, professional, consistent and competitive economic sector.

Specifically, the industry targets to serve 7-8 million international visitors and 32 – 35 million domestic tourists in 2015, earning US$10-11 billion, or 6 percent of the country’s GDP at that time, and creating approximately 2.2 million jobs, including 620,000 direct jobs.

By 2020, it expects to serve 11-12 million international visitors and 45 – 48 million domestic holidaymakers, generating US$18-19 billion and creating 3 million jobs, including 870,000 direct jobs.

According to Dr Ha Van Sieu, Director of Tourism Research Development Institute, tourism human resources must have higher qualifications, management skills and more standardized vocational skills. Low-level tourism workers become less attractive and are replaced by seasonal and self-employed workers.

The institute forecast that the demand for trained tourism workers will rise 9.6 percent in 2011 – 2015.

According estimations by the institute, the demand for tourism workers will increase slightly in all segments in the 2016 – 2020 period, but the largest proportion is in trained workers.

The demand for above-university employees is forecast to rise 13.1 percent in 2011 to 2015 and 9.2 percent from 2016 to 2020, higher than the average personnel growth. The demand for university-level is estimated to climb 10.6 percent and 7.5 percent in the respective periods.

With such demand for human resources, the education and training system must turn out roughly 20,000 tourism graduates each year. However, many experts complained about shortcomings of the Vietnamese tourism training system.

Mr Nguyen Phu Duc, Chairman of the Vietnam Tourism Association, said training units cannot gauge the demand of companies, while training programmes lack professional knowledge, practical skills and communicative skills. As a result, most students cannot quickly adapt to real working environments.

Tourism workers make up only 2.38 percent of the total workforce. If only direct workers are counted, the proportion is only 0.58 percent of the total 45 million people at working age. The tourism industry is striving to become a spearhead economic sector of Vietnam.

Mr Le Van Tao of Thanh Hoa Arts and Culture College, said only a small portion of tourism workers has been trained.

He pointed out that Thanh Hoa province has over 500 hotels, motels, restaurants and travel companies, and needs at least 5,000 tourism workers. However, only 3 percent were trained at university level, 5 percent were trained at primary level and the rest are basically untrained.

Sharing his view, Mr Tran Hai Son, a representative from Khanh Hoa province, said, as of June 2009, the southern central coastal region and the Central Highlands had nearly 74,000 tourism workers, including 24,000 direct workers. However, untrained workers make up more than 70 percent of these.

To address this problem, according to Dr Ha Van Sieu, it is time to take a serious look at tourism human resource training, because hospitability is the face of national culture.

“Underqualified workers will weaken the country economically, politically and socially,” said Mr Sieu. – VCCI

Tags: Vietnam Tourism