Education

Vietnam’s Mega-Conglomerate Starts Its Own University To Overcome Talent Shortage


Vietnam’s economy is expected to grow about 7% this year, fueled by investments in manufactured exports. Factory owners from more developed parts of Asia save money on Vietnam’s low-cost labor, but it’s also low-end labor. Now, as a lot of those firms expand, they’re growing out their administrative offices and R&D staff. That means jobs for techies, marketers and assistants to the country manager. But a lot of those firms are finding a shortage of skilled labor because Vietnam’s schools don’t teach quite what they need.

Vietnam’s Vingroup has a solution. The mega-conglomerate involved in property, tourism and electric vehicles received approval in December to operate its own university from the second half of this year. The $151 million, Hanoi-based school, to be named VinUniversity, intends to find top-rated faculty from around the world to educate undergraduates who would qualify to work in the conglomerate’s growing number of IT jobs, among others, provost Le Mai Lan said in an interview. Admission is already competitive.

“Vingroup aims to develop into a cross-border and leading technology-industry-services group in the region, with a main proportion [in] technology,” Le said. “We need excellent leaders and experts to achieve our aim. Consequently, in the long run, VinUni needs to develop an elite workforce along with the management and development ideology of Vingroup’s businesses.”

Scramble for skilled workers

Since 2012, Vietnam has convinced foreign investors it’s a go-to place for making exports—from car parts to athletic shoes. Monthly minimum wages are as low as $132 and that is attractive for those investors. But that wage pays a factory worker rather than someone who can run the front office or design pricey exports, such as electronics, and Vietnam happens to be headed up the value chain. The International Labour Organization said Vietnam faces a “serious mismatch between the education, skills and experience needed to find and keep a job and the content of formal educational and training qualifications.”

Public universities haven’t caught up to the demands of foreign companies for education in technology and administrative skills, country analysts say. “The universities are decades behind Thailand, and certainly the best universities in China are way ahead of the Vietnamese ones,” said Adam McCarty, chief economist with Mekong Economics in Hanoi. “The Vietnamese ones are just slow to reform.” Today a lot of Vietnam’s most skilled workers came from wealthy families who sent them abroad for education, he added.

Vietnam’s public schools, like those elsewhere in Asia, encourage rote learning to pass exams rather than critical thinking or problem solving, said Murray Hiebert, senior associate at the Southeast Asia Program of the think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Foreign investors want problem solvers for the top jobs, he noted.

More on Forbes: Entrepreneurs Seek To Transform Education In Vietnam

Vietnam’s General Statistic Office said the number of non-skilled laborers comes to 77% of the overall work force, with university graduates at less than 10%. That schism hurts employers looking for factory managers, office managers and assistants, the Vietnam Investment Review reported. Coders are in particular demand in Vietnam, too, said Song Seng Wun, an economist in the private banking unit of CIMB in Singapore. That makes sense since tech multinationals such as Intel and Samsung Electronics invest heavily in the country. “There’s a strong demand,” Song said. “We’ve seen a lot of interest in this space.”

Vingroup preps its own university to ensure supply of talent

The conglomerate-run university will charge tuition of $35,000 per year for undergraduate studies in business administration, computer science and healthcare science, said a Vingroup investor relations liaison. The campus features an eight-story-tall, white European-style building with an imposing steeple and a quad reminiscent of Western universities.

VinUniversity will employ professors with experience in multinationals, Le said, as part of a goal to recruit top faculty. “Our top concern is how to ensure a world-class academic quality for our faculty,” she said. “This is very challenging, and we are currently attracting the world’s elite.” Thousands of professors have already sent CVs, the investor relations liaison added.

Vingroup, chaired by Vietnam’s richest man Pham Nhat Vuong, operates shopping malls, convenience stores, an automaker and a smartphone brand. It reported 2018 revenue of 122 trillion dong ($5.27 billion) and a 6.2 trillion dong profit.

In 2017, Cornell University signed a deal to help develop VinUniversity. The Ivy League school that’s respected in Asia said it’s contributing to campus infrastructure, faculty hiring and curriculum development while “leading the consultative collaboration” for VinUniversity’s business and engineering colleges.

The first 300 students will reach VinUniversity in summer 2020. Are they the chosen few? “Currently, the University has received thousands of applications from many countries around the world,” Le said. “Therefore I think that VinUni will face no difficulty in expanding its size.”



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