It is not accidental that Intel chose Vietnam as a place for invest US$605million in building a chip manufacturing factory. Other leading IT groups in the US and Japan have selected Vietnam as their investment destination and Vietnamese IT enterprises as their partners. Vietnam is in a good position to develop IT, said Subramanyam Venkatakrishnan, country manager of software group, IBM Vietnam, as th e country had cheap labour alongside talented experts in algorithm and support policies for IT development. More importantly, capital can be mobilised from different sources to develop IT.
The Vietnamese Government is making efforts to develop the software industry. Recently, the Ministry of Post and Telematics has announced a strategy for the development of the software industry in the 2006-2010 period as one of the activities in 2006. Under the strategy, Vietnam will maintain a growth rate of 40 per cent per year for the software and information industries. Accordingly, in 2010, total revenues of the industries will reach US$1.2billion with half a figure coming from export. To that end, apart from enterprises' efforts, the Government's policies on supporting and developing the industries are needed.
The first issue is about human r
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New ideas are highly appreciated
Trinh Thanh Lam, Public Sector and Education Director, Microsoft Vietnam
We have always considered human resources a decisive factor for the development of the software industry. The Vietnamese education system is basically good. However, when joins a global competition, the country should co-operate with giants, such as Microsoft, to train IT engineers and experts with internationally-recognised certificates, including certificates of Microsoft and Cisco. In particular, IT experts and engineers should be trained with English for English-speaking markets, Korean for the
Republic of
Korea 's market and Japanese for the Japanese market. We highly appreciate FPT's idea about the formation of a FTP university with learning materials meeting the international standard, focusing on IT. In particular, some subjects will be lectured in English.
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esources development. Venkatakrishnan said that the Vietnamese Government should prioritise the development of learning materials for Vietnam's education levels, especially university education. At present, learning materials are updated and renewed every five years. This is quite slow and learning materials should be updated annually to meet the demand for updating latest information, in particular in IT. IBM has co-operated with Vietnamese partners to open IT training courses for the purpose. At the same time, Venkatakrishnan said, IBM would bring Vietnamese enterprises and partners to the markets, where Vietnamese enterprises can meet local demand.
Talking about the issue, Pham Tan Cong, vice chairman of the Vietnam Software Association (Vinasa), said that Vietnam would not rely on human resources trained in State-owned universities but to promote the socialisation of human resources development for IT. This is proven with the permission for the FPT Group to open an IT university. Vinasa is proposing the opening of a Japanese IT university in Vietnam. The Japanese Government has invested in building an IT training centre for Vietnamese engineers and their colleagues from Laos and Cambodia.
Another IT giant, Microsoft, has joined IT human resources development by signing a co-operation agreement on training 50,000 IT teachers for Vietnam in five years in June 2006. So far, 4,000 IT teachers have been trained and Microsoft will help train another 10,000 in 2007. Recently, during Bill Gates's visit to Vietnam on April 22, Microsoft signed the 'Unlimited Potential' programme to develop community training centres in remote areas in Vietnam. Having learnt about FPT's idea about the building of an IT university, Microsoft pledged to develop and integrate all Microsoft certificates into the FPT system. As a result, Vietnamese engineers and experts will have internationally-recognised certificates soon.
During his visit in April, Bill Gates said he was surprised at Vietnam. He emailed high-ranking officials of Microsoft about opportunities in Vietnam. After his visit, Bill Gates asked officials of Microsoft to review IT groups, which are partners of Microsoft and operate in outsourcing and call centre, to invite them to explore opportunities in Vietnam.
Vietnamese
