Demand for human resources in Vietnam’s information technology (IT) sector has reached a five-year peak with nearly 63,000 jobs to be filled in 2019, according to the second quarter report on Vietnam’s IT market conducted by TopDev, an IT recruitment network and ecosystem.

Personnel of NextTech Group (Photo: ictnews.vn) 

This number is five times higher than 2015’s demand and represents a growth of 56 percent compared to last year. TopDev’s data also showed this is the highest growth rate in the recruitment need for IT personnel since 2015.

Manpower demand is rising fast in areas like artificial intelligence, data science, big data, and cybersecurity.

“Vietnam’s technology community is facing two waves,” said Nguyen Huu Binh, TopDev’s CEO.

First, foreign investment funds are flocking to Vietnam and following more new openings of start-ups with innovative technological solutions to serve rising social demands. Second is the wave of digital transformation of enterprises which need to apply advanced technology to enhance competition and wish to hire more IT staff.

“The wave of tech start-ups and the increase in projects from big companies have contributed significantly to the surging demand for IT personnel,” Binh said and added that "when the market is in short supply, IT engineers know their value, so retaining them is a headache for many businesses".

The thirst for IT workers is also shown in the results of the 2019 university entrance exam when admission scores for the IT major at universities exceeded other “traditional top majors” such as medical and pharmaceutical.

Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung has said Vietnam needs to develop new 50,000 ICT enterprises to accelerate the country’s digitalisation process as the country is building a strategy of transitioning to a digital economy.

The hiring demand for IT engineers has been growing stronger than ever and at this rate, it will need to fill 400,000 jobs by the end of 2021, but now only about 200,000 people are qualified for the work requirement, according to the report.  

Despite rising salaries and benefits, Vietnam will face a shortage of 90,000 IT workers in 2019, 100,000 by 2020 and 190,000 by 2021.

IT workers may be offered salaries of up to 18,000 USD per year but many businesses still struggle to find suitable staff. The top five highest-paying jobs include machine learning/artificial intelligence, data scientist, dev-ops specialist, full-stack developer and embedded developer, with monthly salaries ranging between 1,120 USD and 1,497 USD.

According to data from the Ministry of Education and Training, the country has a total of 235 universities nationwide, including 153 IT training colleges with annual output of 50,000 IT graduates. However, only 30 percent of them are able to work right after graduation while the other 70 percent require additional training.

“The issue of training high quality IT personnel is becoming a focus of both the education sector and IT businesses to satisfy work demand,” the report said.