Earlier this year, Thu Hien, a worker at a software firm in HCM City, was informed that marketing staff should use AI tools regularly to serve marketing campaigns for the company. Hien immediately rushed to find a training course on AI to improve work efficiency.

Since mid-2023, many AI courses have appeared on online platforms and training centers have also begun courses.

Ads about training courses sound attractive: “Earn $1,000 from AI’, ‘Learn how to use AI, or get dismissed’. People, especially office workers, rush to learn about AI for fear of job loss.

However, analysts warned that it is very difficult to find high-quality training courses, because many of them are equivocal and impractical.

Le Thuc, a full-time officer at an import-export company in HCM City, said he spent VND5 million to attend the course ‘Making money with AI’ and was disappointed because the lack of knowledge of the lecturers.

The course was advertised as lasting 12 days, but he gave up after the fourth day  because he felt a waste of time. In general, lecturers only provided theoretical knowledge which he can find anywhere on the internet, and they were confused themselves when dealing with problems during practical lessons.

Dang Huu Son, deputy chair of AIID, an alliance on human resources development, a startup with LovinBot, an edtech AI-based tool, said most of the training courses advertised on the internet and the course followed by Thuc only teach ‘toolsets’, not ‘mindsets’, or the procedures and skills to master AI.

Many lecturers accessed AI only several months ago.

“It is easy to teach and to learn the toolset, but the knowledge is not deep. If you just learn the toolset, you will have to continue learning in the future, because tools change rapidly and you can’t learn all the tools. But if you learn the mindset and standard mindset, you won’t rely on any tool,” Son explained.

At courses, trainees mostly learn how to create GPT accounts and how to use ChatGPT. At first, the fees were between VND500,000 and VND1 million, but now, some courses are up to VND10 million.

Le My