IT engineers in bad need

The demand for skilled IT engineers fluent in Japanese will be limitless in the next decade

According to the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the country currently has about 920,000 IT engineers and needs about 171,000 more to meet its actual demand. By 2020, Japan is expected to be short of 369,000 IT engineers and the figure could more than double to 789,000 by 2030.

These figures were released at the recent 12^th Japan ICT Day which took place concurrently in Hanoi and Danang.

According to METI, only 1.9 per cent of Japanese firms use AI applications. However, the country’s demand for newly-emerging technologies like IoT, robotics or Big Data is on a sharp rise.

Hironobu Kitagawa, chief representative of Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO) in Hanoi, assumed that the shortage of IT engineers and soaring demand will usher in enormous cooperation opportunities for Japanese and Vietnamese companies in the upcoming time.

It is not only Japanese firms that are thirsty for IT workforce, local firms providing services, solutions, and software for Japan are also in bad need for manpower.

Hoang Nam Tien, chairman of FPT Software, said that about 20,000 Vietnamese engineers are working in Japan in information technology outsourcing (ITO) and business processing outsourcing (BPO).

FPT Software currently has about 1,000 personnel working at five Japan-based offices and 5,000 more in Vietnam to implement projects for Japanese customers.

This year, to meet the growing workload from Japanese customers, FPT Software envisages recruiting about 2,000 personnel to serve the Japanese market alone.

FPT Software’s Project P3.M35 in Japan currently employs a personnel of 400, which is expected to be doubled right this month and continue soaring in the coming months as the project expands.

From now to 2020, FPT Japan is set to employ nearly 1,000 IT personnel to meet its development needs.

“Japan is in dire need for IT workforce and the demand for those proficient in the Japanese language will be limitless in the next decade,” said Le Tec Nen, director of Project P3.M35.

According to Junko Kawauchi, vice president of Japan Information Technology Services Association (JISA), Vietnam is one of the countries that offer quality IT human resources.

Vietnamese IT engineers only account for a mere 4 per cent of all foreign IT engineers working in Japan currently, 53 per cent of whom are Chinese and 15 per cent are Korean. However, the pace of growth of this proportion is the fastest among Japan’s foreign partners.

The reason why only a modest percentage of the Vietnamese IT engineers are working in Japan currently is that Vietnamese IT engineers still fall short of Japanese partners’ requirements. Recent statistics by the National Institute of Information and Communications Strategy show that up to 72 per cent of IT students lack practical experience after graduation, 42 per cent lack teamwork skills, and 80 per cent of programmers need re-training.