BÌNH DƯƠNG — The southern province of Bình Dương is focusing on strengthening links between vocational training schools and companies and industrial parks to improve the quality of human resources.

Phạm Văn Tuyên, deputy head of the provincial Department of Labour, Invalids, and Social Affairs, told Việt Nam News Agency the department encourages every vocational training institution to collaborate with 5-15 enterprises.

This is expected to help their training meet enterprises’needs, he said.

The department has done a survey on companies’ labour needs for schools to improve training.

The province has increased investment in equipment at vocational training schools, and those that have not yet used their equipment and funds effectively should soon take advantage of them to improve the quality of training, Tuyên said.

The department has made plans to restructure the functioning of vocational schools, with those working efficiently given complete autonomy and inefficient ones shut down, he said.

The province has 76 vocational training schools and centres and they enroll nearly 30,000 students a year, mostly in electrical, electronics, mechanical, and IT streams.

By 2020 the rate of trained workers will be around 80 per cent, appropriate for the province’s economic transition and urbanisation and meeting the needs of investors in services and industry.

The province has 28 industrial parks with more than one million workers, more than 85 per cent of whom studied up to secondary or high school.  

Trần Thành Trọng, general director of Sáng Ban Mai Corporation, which manufactures diesel generators of up to 2,500 KVA in Bình Dương Province, said the company has to employ untrained workers because of a human resource shortage.

They are then trained for six months in operating machines, he said.

Even graduates from vocational training schools have to be retrained because they lack skills, he lamented.

Nguyễn Thanh Phương, deputy director of the province’s Employment Service Centre, said companies needed nearly 69,000 workers in the first half of this year, but only managed to find 58 per cent of that number.

Many of them had to hire unskilled labour and train them, he said.

The labour market needs trained workers in most sectors like electronics and so schools should offer students proper counselling on the virtues of vocational courses, he said.

In the first six months of this year nearly 1,486 people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees were unemployed, he pointed out.

Tuyên said his department would co-ordinate with the Department of Education and Training to provide counselling about vocational training to secondary school students.

It would also disseminate information about vocational training, especially in rural areas, he added. —VNS