Supply and demand for jobs have not met yet.
Present at the Ho Chi Minh City Employment Service Center, Ms. Nguyen Thi Thuong said that many businesses recruit workers at the end of the year but do not match her conditions or she does not meet the requirements. "It is also difficult to find a job at the end of the year, so I applied for unemployment benefits in advance, hoping to have some money to buy a ticket back to my hometown in the North after Tet and then think about it," Ms. Thuong said.
According to Ms. Nguyen Van Hanh Thuc - Director of Ho Chi Minh City Employment Service Center, in reality there is a mismatch between recruitment needs and job search needs, many times the number of job seekers is less than recruitment needs.
In 2024, the number of people applying for unemployment insurance (UI) was 142,059, the center introduced jobs to 32,000 people and the number of people receiving jobs was 10,000 people.
Explaining why many businesses have difficulty recruiting workers, Ms. Thuc said that after the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers moved from Ho Chi Minh City to the provinces and have not returned. This is shown through the data on unemployment insurance settlement, with more than 50% of workers applying for unemployment insurance benefits coming from other provinces to Ho Chi Minh City to work.
In addition, the trend of many labor-intensive enterprises is gradually shifting to neighboring provinces of Ho Chi Minh City due to low labor costs, large premises, suitable for ensuring the working environment. Some enterprises have low salary and bonus regimes, unfavorable working conditions leading to difficulties in recruitment, especially in the field of unskilled labor.
A number of workers have applied for unemployment insurance, but do not want to return to work in enterprises and are willing to work in the informal sector such as driving Grab, delivering goods for enterprises, selling online goods... without paying social insurance to continue receiving all the months of unemployment insurance benefits (at least 3 months, at most 12 months) and have no need to find a job during the unemployment period.
Trained workers find jobs 99.13%
Ms. Nguyen Hoang Hieu - Director of the Center for Human Resources Demand Forecasting and Labor Market Information of Ho Chi Minh City - said that through a survey of more than 165,000 employees looking for jobs in 2024, it showed that the demand for jobs among trained workers was nearly 164,000 people, accounting for 99.13%; the demand for jobs among unskilled workers was 1,438 people, accounting for 0.87%, mainly concentrated in job positions such as data entry staff; sales staff; marketing staff; delivery; collaborator; security staff; packaging staff; service staff.
Ms. Hieu said that in the context of rapid technological development and the increasingly widespread digital transformation trend, the labor market is also facing many major changes in working forms, recruitment needs and skill requirements. The digitalization process has made online recruitment, employee assessment and training a popular trend. At the same time, the remarkable development of artificial intelligence (AI) is developing the labor market in a new direction, requiring human resources to be trained in depth and updated regularly to meet new requirements.
It is forecasted that by 2025, Ho Chi Minh City will need about 310,000 - 330,000 jobs. Ms. Hieu recommends that employees need to be proactive, improve their skills and prepare for changes to suit labor market trends. For businesses, it is necessary to promote internal training, on-site training and cooperative training to improve employees' professional skills, closely follow the job requirements of the business and improve the quality and productivity of the business.
“Businesses also need to pay attention to welfare and create a friendly, flexible working environment with competitive salaries and bonuses to attract and retain talent. In particular, businesses need to pay more attention to the mental health of employees to help them balance work and life, and feel secure in sticking with the business for a long time,” Ms. Hieu recommended.
