Companies thirsty for senior talent

Amid the digital transformation, domestic and foreign-invested firms have been looking for qualified talent, Photo: Shutterstock

Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions Vietnam Company this month was renamed Bosch Global Software Technologies Ltd (BGSV). The strategic name change comes with an enhancement in the company’s capabilities, competencies, business model, and engagements to scale and continue to play a dominant role in software and product engineering at Bosch.

Bosch now plans to expand operations in Vietnam by establishing a new software centre in Hanoi in February and increasing the total number of software engineers for the two centres to 6,000 people by 2025. At present, the current centre in Ho Chi Minh City has approximately 2,400 software talents.

Dattatri Salagame, CEO, president, and managing director at BGSV said, “In line with that, the company is working on reskilling and upskilling niche competencies to execute highly complex projects. Recruiting the best software talents is our competitive advantage.”

“The company’s hiring strategy is to recruit best-in-class talents from premier universities in the areas of data management, analytics, AI, cloud technologies, user experience, and cybersecurity among others,” he said.

According to human resource consulting firm Talentnet, senior talents are highly sought after by companies like Bosch in almost all sectors, such as production, retail, finance and banking, IT, and agriculture. The high demand for recruiting senior candidates comes from the expansion of enterprises, the shifting of foreign investors to Vietnam, and the consecutive debut of e-commerce companies and startups.

Based on Navigos Search’s report on the recruitment demand for mid-and-high ranking employees in the Vietnamese market in the second quarter of 2021 and forecasts for the second half of last year, employees were still hired in the agricultural sector in the north of Vietnam, but only in positions requiring highly qualified candidates. The semiconductor industry is expected to see a high recruitment demand and potential in the next five years at the very least because the industry is attracting much attention and investment from foreign enterprises.

The demand for human resources in the IT industry also continues to increase. Along with the publication of recruitment information on specialised websites for IT people such as ITViec and TopDev, companies also actively hunt for IT human resources on recruitment websites with diverse subjects such as TopCV and Vietnamworks. Recruitment teams of businesses are also headhunting on Zalo, Facebook, and even Telegram and Skype groups.

Despite seemingly abundant demand, there is an uphill struggle in terms of supply. Giang Hai Anh, human resource development manager at NAL Solutions – a Vietnamese-Japanese joint venture software company under NAL Holding – said that in 2022, the company has demand for 300 vacancies in Danang, Thua Thien-Hue, Ho Chi Minh City, and Can Tho. However, this target means pressure for NAL Solutions due to the shortage of qualified personnel.

In 2021, enterprises in Vietnam required to recruit 450,000 vacancies in the IT sector; however, as of the first quarter of last year, the available IT engineers were 430,000 people only, equalling a lack of 20,000 people, according to TopDev’s 2020 IT market report in August.

This year, the shortage is estimated to increase to 150,000 as the market is forecasted to need 530,000 programmers. The reason for the shortfall is the disparity between the programmer’s qualifications and business requirements. Currently, only about 16,500 of 55,000 students majoring in IT meet the skill requirements of enterprises, accounting for nearly 30 per cent only.

Meanwhile, based on Navigos Search’s observation, despite the demand for senior talents in the agricultural sector is always high, Vietnamese applicants in the sector are usually not good at English. Therefore, large companies tend to hire foreigners as senior managers for the livestock and poultry sector. Thai, Indonesian, and Brazilian applicants usually have advantages for their knowledge, professional competence, and management capacity.

To resolve the situation, the Ministry of Science and Technology is collecting comments from relevant ministries, experts, institutions, branches, and localities before submitting a draft strategy for approval.

The ministry established groups including a compilation board, an editorial team, and a standing editorial team from the end of 2020 and coordinated with relevant institutions to develop the draft strategy. The teams finished the first part of the strategy concerning achievements, limitations, causes, and lessons learned from the last decade, which will serve for the development of the new strategy for the current decade.