Hanoi (VNA) – A shortage of IT personnel has prompted Japan toadopt measures to attract foreign talents in the field, which opens upopportunities for Vietnamese IT engineers and firms.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan estimated that thecountry will lack 369,000 IT engineers in 2020 and 789,000 by 2030.

To fill in the gap, Japanese firms have stepped up efforts to hire foreignIT personnel in recent years.

At the Vietnam IT Day in Japan in February this year, Chairman of FPTSoftware Hoang Nam Tien confidently declared that with a skilled workforce,Vietnam is the answer to Japan’s problem on IT manpower.

Vietnam’s universities graduate around 55,000 IT engineers each year.

According to FPT Software, initial statistics showed around 20,000Vietnamese workers are serving the Japanese market in IT outsourcing (ITO) andbusiness product outsourcing (BPO).

The company itself has 1,000 employees working at its 5 offices in Japanand 5,000 others involving in contracts for Japanese customers.

FPT Software reported revenues of nearly 3.6 trillion VND from theJapanese market in 2017, up 26 percent from 2016 and accounting for 58 percentof its total revenue.

The company needs to recruit 2,000 more employees this year to meet theincreasing flow of orders from Japan.

Since 2014, Vietnam has been the second largest partner of Japan interms of ITO and BPO. A dozen of Vietnamese software firms have opened subsidiariesin Japan.

Recently, several Japanese companies have joined hands with universitiesin Asian countries, including Vietnam, to train IT human resources for theJapanese market.

One such example is Framgia Inc., which set up its subsidiary in Vietnamin October 2012. Framgia Vietnam has partnered up with Vietnam’s three leadinguniversities in terms of IT training to provide training and help students findjobs in Japan. Students participating in the cooperation programme will attendtwo classes entirely in Japanese a week with Japanese lecturers who areexperienced IT engineers.

According to Framgia, nearly 800 Vietnamese students have joined thetraining programme so far at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology,the Da Nang University of Science and Technology and the University ofEngineering and Technology under the Vietnam National University-Hanoi.

The company hopes to increase the number of students joining theprogramme to 1,000.

Besides training, Framgia also coordinated with local universities tohold job fairs for IT students. At the latest Vietnam IT Job Fair held byFramgia and the Hanoi University of Science and Technology in June, fourJapanese companies recruited 16 Vietnamese students.

A representative of Sigma XYZ, one of the companies attending the jobfair, said he was impressed by the students’ capacity in both professionalskills and working under pressure.-VNA