The plan, developed by the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs(MOLISA), aimed to develop high-quality TVET institutes, teachers and managersas well as pilot key vocational training courses at ASEAN and internationallevels.
According to MOLISA Deputy Minister Le Quan, Vietnam had 45 vocational schoolsoffering 12 Australian courses and 22 German courses.
“Tuition fees for these courses are kept low while the diplomas they receiveare issued by either our Australian or German counterparts,” he said.
Nearly 300 teachers have taken English language courses in Australia under theplan, and will go on to train other teachers in the vocational educationsector.
Meanwhile, more than 260 teachers were sent to Germany to consolidate theirlecturing and vocational skills in preparation for 66 new courses that startedin November 2019.
The schools include the Lilama 2 International College, the Hanoi College ofElectro-mechanics and the Hue Industrial College, which are highly valued fortheir facilities.
New opportunities
Nguyen Tien Thinh enrolled at Bac Ninh Province Electro-mechanics VocationalCollege after taking a gap year, a bad decision in the eyes of many Vietnamesepeople.
The programme, which is transferred from Australia, is much more demanding thanthe domestic equivalent. As trainees are requested to reach B1 English level,the 23-year-old spent a year studying the language.
“After another two and a half years of professional training, my English skillswere good enough to work for foreign companies. If I go to work in Europe, Ionly need to submit the English certificate besides the vocational educationdiploma,” Thinh said.
“Having both professional and English languages skills are advantages for the programme’sgraduates.”
Vu Hoai Phuong, director of Hue Tourism College in Thua Thien-Hue province,said collaboration with foreign vocational training colleges helped Vietnamesecounterparts approach international standard curricula. Graduates from Hue TourismCollege’s two courses on resort management and tour guide training followingAustralian standards secure improved job opportunities.
“Our transferred programmes are evaluated by German experts. After any session,trainees have to fill an assessment form. These programmes also ask trainees tohave a one-year internship at companies, accounting for 30 per cent of thecurricula,” said Dong Van Ngoc, director of Hanoi College of Electro-mechanics.
The school has offered two German courses of industrial electricity and metal cuttingsince the end of 2019 with 16 trainees for each class.
Extension
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc urged Vietnam’s vocational training toefficiently promote labourers’ skills at Skilling up Vietnam – the country’slargest-ever forum on vocational training held in Hanoi in November 2019.
He stressed that the population of nearly 100 million people was the economy’smajor engine, not natural resources.
“Labour skills, management skills, intellectual capacity and professionalcapacity determine national growth,” said PM Phuc.
“Expanding the scale and improving the quality of vocational training plays animportant part of creating skilled human resources and increasingproductivity,” he added.
However, the percentage of domestic businesses working with vocational schoolsremained low at 12.3 per cent, according to a report released by the NationalAssembly's Committee for Culture, Education, Youth, Adolescents and Childrenreleased in last October.
Loose cooperation made it difficult to improve vocational education, satisfythe market’s rising demands for workers and solving unemployment in Vietnam,the report said./.