The report analyzing the labor market in Can Tho City in the first 6 months of 2026 and forecasting the labor demand in the last 6 months of the year by the City Employment Service Center shows a relative disparity between labor supply and demand in occupational groups.
The assessment is based on data collected from 1,003 businesses with recruitment needs, with 68,992 vacant jobs to be recruited and job search needs of 59,795 workers.
In which, the occupational group with a fairly large labor supply-demand gap is garment - handicrafts - food processing - plastics - printing, with a labor demand rate of up to 58.65% while the labor supply rate is only 41.35%.
The reason is that in the first months of the year, businesses focused all their efforts to promote order production to serve major holidays and stockpile goods to supply for the soaring shopping demand of the domestic market near Tet. Maximizing machine capacity and expanding new production lines has caused the demand for general labor recruitment of businesses to increase sharply.
However, the labor supply cannot be stretched in time due to the pressure of factory work during peak season, combined with the trend of shifting labor flow, especially young workers, to more freelance and flexible jobs.
At the same time, businesses are also accelerating and promoting production to complete year-end orders in time. Meanwhile, workers often limit job hopping and job transfers in the last months of the year to be able to receive bonuses and benefits from the company.
The increase in production pressure for the last 6 months of the year from businesses, in contrast to the tightening of labor supply, has pushed up the "thirst" for human resources in this industry group.
In addition, although businesses simultaneously accelerate production and expand scale, leading to a sharp increase in recruitment demand from unskilled workers to high-quality personnel, local supply is not keeping up. This stems from 2 core reasons: the disparity in practical skills (the gap between training quality and enterprise digitization requirements) and the strong shift of young labor force to foreign labor markets such as Korea, Japan... or major domestic economic centers.
The fact that the preferential policies and salaries of some businesses have not kept up with the expectations of job seekers in the current context also makes vacant positions difficult to fill, creating a widespread paradox of "surplus work, shortage of people".
