Skilled labour shortage for software companies

July 04, 2016 - 11:29

A shortage of high-quality labourers has caused headaches for a range of software companies in central Đà Nẵng City that wanted to do business with foreign countries.

A shortage of high-quality labourers has caused headaches for a range of software companies in central Đà Nẵng City that wanted to do business with foreign countries. — Photo baodanang.vn

ĐÀ NẴNG — A shortage of high-quality labourers has caused headaches for a range of software companies in central Đà Nẵng City that wanted to do business with foreign countries.

Statistics from the city Software Association showed that only 600 of 3,000 IT students meet the requirements of local software companies after graduating last year.

In the first six months of this year, there are up to 1,600 job vacancies related to the IT sector, including programmers, application developers and software managers, from more than 100 software companies in the city, the association said.

However, the companies failed to recruit high-quality labourers as expected.

Vy Văn Việt, director of iViettech Education Centre, based in Đà Nẵng, said an engineer working in the software sector had to know how to create an application. But in schools, students were often taught about theory rather than actually creating or developing an application.

They were also lacking English and other soft skills needed to work effectively, he said.

According to software experts, the major reason recruiters rejected graduate students was because they failed to show recruiters their skills in developing or analysing an application.

Hunt for skilled software engineers

The city’s Software Association said due to the shortage, the hunting of skilled software engineers had occurred among local software companies in recent years.

The occurrence of high-quality software engineers quitting their jobs after being offered higher salaries by other companies is quite common. The matter of human-resource change has put pressure on the companies.

In the short term, responding to the situation, software companies belonging to the city’s software association had worked with each other to rotate skilled labourers in order to minimise changes in human resources as well as ensure benefits for each company, Đặng Ngọc Hải, of Daxon Active Việt Nam Co Ltd said to Đà Nẵng newspaper.

To fill the gap between the quality of graduate students and the quality of engineers that recruiters demand, companies should give training courses to graduate students so that they could meet requirements. It was believed to be an effective way to improve the quality of labourers, Võ Thanh Hải, vice principal of Duy Tân University said. — VNS

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