According to the Da Nang Software Business Association, local companies offer a total of around 5,000 job opportunities for the city’s fresh IT graduates every year.  However, the city’s software businesses are now facing a severe shortage of high-quality IT employees, especially software testers and computer programmers.

The Director of the FPT Software Da Nang company (Fsoft Da Nang), Mr Nguyen Tuan Phuong, remarked that many local IT graduates do not meet the recruitment requirements of local businesses due to their lack of background knowledge, foreign language proficiency and other soft skills. 

Employees at an IT company

Only about 1,000 IT graduates are recruited by local IT companies every year, and this figure does not meet the increasing recruitment demand of the local IT market.  Therefore, many local IT businesses find it very difficult to compete with their foreign rivals due to this severe shortage of high-quality IT employees. 

In 2011, Fsoft Da Nang had a total of 400 employees, and this figure climbed to 1,400 in 2014.  Since the beginning of this year, the company has recruited 700 more employees and it is now striving to reach a target of earning 170 million USD in revenue and employing 10,000 staff members in total by 2020.  The intention is to ensure there are sufficient human resources to implement the company’s contracts signed with its large domestic and foreign partners.

According to the latest statistics released by VietnamWorks.com, the largest online recruitment site in Viet Nam, IT topped the list of 10 sectors with the highest demand for employees during the first half of this year.  However, many IT companies in Da Nang, and those in the central region as a whole, had to recruit employees from such countries as Singapore, Myanmar and the Philippines. 

In an effort to develop higher quality human resources in the local IT sector, since 2014 many local universities and colleges have cooperated with local IT companies to introduce new IT-related subjects for their students.

Over recent years, Fsoft Da Nang has also entered many cooperation agreements with some universities to provide Japanese language training programmes and offer job opportunities to their IT students.  The company will also offer internship opportunities for third-year IT students with Japanese skills.  Students who meet the N3 level of Japanese proficiency will be employed by the company.

According to local IT experts, the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), which will be officially established on 31 December 2015, will ensure a free flow of skilled labour within the region.  Da Nang is emerging as a new market full of great IT development potential in comparison with other localities in the northern and southern regions.  The city is likely to attract many large worldwide groups, and local companies will always attach importance to recruiting employees who possess high professional skills.