Under the 13th Party Congress Resolution, Vietnam’s digital economy would make up 20 percent of GDP in 2021-2025. Meanwhile, the Politburo’s Resolution No52 on Vietnam’s participation on the fourth industrial revolution says Vietnam’s digital economy would account for 30 percent of GDP by 2030.

According to Google and Temasek, Vietnam has the fastest growing digital economy in Southeast Asia in 2022-2023, with e-commerce growth rate of 11 percent, digital economic tourism 82 percent, and digital payment 19 percent.

The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) has estimated that a\the digital economy contributed 16.5 percent to GDP in 2023.

Dinh Thi Nga, Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics under the Ho Chi Minh National Academy of Politics, emphasized two factors – improving digital skills and upgrading the workforce quality – as the most important solutions to develop digital economy in Vietnam.

“High-quality workforce is the key factor to attract foreign investment to Vietnam’s digital economy,” Nga said.

According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the number of IT qualified workers in ministries, branches and localities is 50 percent higher than the quota allocated to them. In 2021, for example, 10,865 IT qualified workers were used, while the quota was 5,426. The figures were 11,253 vs 5,568 in 2022 and 14, 682 vs 6,215 in 2023.

MIC predicted that Vietnam would need 1,601,967 IT staff majoring in digital technology  by 2025 and 2,718,751 by 2030.

Nga stressed that it is urgently necessary to deploy a digital higher education model, reform training curriculums, and deploy digital skill training in association with market demand which can satisfy requirements of national digital transformation.

50,000 semiconductor engineers by 2030

In 2023, the world’s leading semiconductors corporations chose Vietnam as the destination to develop huge projects capitalized from hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars.

The Vietnam-US joint declaration about the comprehensive strategic partnership shows that the two sides recognize Vietnam’s great potential to become a key country in the world’s semiconductor industry. The US government has committed an initial seeding grant of $2 million to Vietnam. This is Vietnam’s new step forward on the path of building the industry valued at hundreds of billions of dollars.

To concretize the joint statement and cooperation plans between the two countries, during his working visit to the US on September 17-23, 2023, the head of the Vietnamese Government spent time working with leaders of many leading US technology corporations such as Synopsys, Meta and Nvidia.

Just three months later, Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, the global most expensive chip manufacturing corporation with a market value of nearly $1.2 trillion, came to Vietnam.

During the working visit, Huang stated that Nvidia wants to establish a semiconductor center in Vietnam to attract talent from all over the world to develop a semiconductor and AI ecosystem, foster hi-tech startups, design and develop super-computers, and produce software.

Hung Tran, PhD, an overseas Vietnamese running a technology firm in the US, affirmed that young people in Silicon Valley are ready to join forces to help produce high qualified workers, thus helping Vietnam grasp opportunities brought by the Vietnam-US relationship.

During his business trip to Japan in mid-December 2023, PM Pham Minh Chinh called on Japanese enterprises to join forces with Vietnamese to develop the semiconductor industry and help Vietnam produce a highly qualified workforce.

He hoped that Japanese would make investments in Vietnam, help train workers for the semiconductor industry, and set up designing, production, and packaging workshops for export.

The head of the Vietnamese government committed that Vietnam would quickly prepare high-quality IT labor force that can satisfy the requirements of foreign investors. 

Vietnam now has 1 million IT engineers and MOET has been assigned to produce 50,000 semiconductor engineers by 2030.

In Japan, the ceremony on exchanging diplomatic note for Japanese Grant Aid for Human Resource Development (JDS) was organized. The Japanese government will provide non-refundable aid worth 685 million yen ($4.8 million), which will be granted to Vietnamese citizens working at state agencies as scholarships to fund their studies in Japan.

It is expected that 45 candidates will be granted the scholarship in 2024 to go to Japan to study for a master’s degree and five for a doctorate.

Thu Hang