Workers equipped with job-related skills to keep up with the labor market

​(CTT-Dong Nai) In recent years, many new occupations have been created, changing the trend of labor market development towards: Increasing the number of employees on technology platforms; career change associated with soft skills; simple labor will become irrelevant; the trend of “start-up, self-employment" labor will increase. 

Workers need to change their skills and working mindset to be able to co-exist and work with robots. 

This puts new requirements on the training and development of vocational skills for employees, requiring the participants in the labor relationship to update and develop to match the continuous development of the daily life.

The need to change skills and working mindset
According to Mr. Tran Anh Tuan, Human Resource Forecaster, Vice Chairman of Ho Chi Minh City Vocational Education Association, the investment in machinery, production automation and digital technology application will gradually become more popular and changing the labor market. This move also originates from Vietnam's shift to the digital transformation period and will become the mainstream in the current digital era. According to statistics in Vietnam, 68% of jobs require knowledge of digital skills with basic computer skills, while 1/5 of jobs need specialized computer skills.
The demand for trained human resources accounts for over 90% on average. In which, the demand for university-educated human resources accounts for an average of 20%, colleges account for 18%, intermediate school education accounts for 27% and primary education accounts for 25%. 

In order to be suitable for the labor market that develops according to the requirements of Industry 4.0 and integration, workers need to ensure 6 professional quality conditions, including: professional competency (understanding and applying the profession, adapting to working environment, easy for advanced training,...); special skills (communication skills, teamwork and balancing work pressure); discipline, working ethics and labor responsibility; understand and apply technological equipment (including information technology); be able to efficiently use at least 1 foreign language; specific understanding of the market and the laws (including labor law).
Mr. Tran Anh Tuan shared: “The labor market forecasts showed that about 75% of the workforce in Vietnam will be impacted by the 4.0 technology revolution. Science - technology factors are considered to change the nature of many jobs, causing employers to require more complex skills such as cooperation, evaluation, management, creativity, and decision-making. ...".
Therefore, skilled workers, fluent in foreign languages and able to adapt well to the constantly changing working environment will be highly appreciated. In particular, employers believe that active learning skills become a necessary requirement of every employee.
The need for workers in the future industries have changed, the machines in factories are in need of workers with new skills to operate. That is "intellectual workers", including workers who can operate automated machines, solving problems that robots cannot do. From these experiences, it showed that the Vietnamese market is seriously lacking this kind of human resource. In the time when many jobs being replaced by robots, people need to change their skills and working mindset to be able to co-exist and work with robots. ​

Lifelong learning is what makes a successful employee 

​Success comes from continuously learning

Currently, many students often consider that vocational skills are occupational skills, but that is not really true. In fact, vocational skills are the ability to work and complete a job of a person for a specific field. Meanwhile, occupational skills include technical skills (professional skills) and general skills (also known as soft skills).

Vocational training and skill development play a vital role for employees, employers in particular and the labor market in general. The 2019 Labor Code stipulates that employers are required to organize annual training activities for their employees.
From the perspective of schools, training institutions are increasingly actively strengthening their connections with businesses during the training process. This is an important trend and considered a bridge in ensuring and improving the quality of training. This is a way to improve the quality of input human resources of employers and enterprises.
By referring to the nature of job and employment position of each career field in an enterprise, training institutions have developed training programs or modified or supplemented to suit the needs of the market. Many businesses also participate in the process of training and testing and evaluating students.

 “No matter what level of education, all students will have to enter the labor market. Each person must do whatever to have a profession value, a competency value to be successful," said Mr. Tuan.
Those who know how to choose a major, a career, an appropriate level of study, have a specialty, have excellent ability and study well... will build up values and good working competency. The professional qualifications that each person obtains later in their lives must be associated with common cultural knowledge and go hand-in-hand with good skills and valuable practice. Only then can we stand firm in the current and future labor market.
The development of the modern economy - society, the rapid development of technology forces us to access technology and knowledge. Therefore, if you want to be successful, today's young people can't do apprenticeships in the "vocational" style anymore, but have to go through the training system of schools, have to access the knowledge of mankind, the knowledge of the profession. Only then can it be converted into a skill to succeed.

 Thus, the decisive factor for people's success in the labor market is how each person turns his or her degree into a career skill. Hopefully young people will not misunderstand between qualifications and careers, between degrees and labor market values. Those are two factors that combine and blend together.
Another factor that is also very important to employees' success is continuously learning. It is simply understood as the daily accumulation of knowledge and socio-historical experiences through formal amd non-formal forms of learning so that each person can "enrich" their knowledge, professional skills, acquiring values, improve their self-mastery capacity, master new knowledge, new techniques and technologies to always be able to adapt to the rapid changes of the world in the era of integration and innovation.