From more than 7 am on March 29, the area hosting the Lang Son Provincial Job Fair was bustling with people coming in and out. At the booths, groups of students wearing uniforms, students holding applications ready, workers took the opportunity to visit each consulting table to ask about jobs, vocational training, salaries, and accommodation.
Some students, just after listening to the introduction, pulled their friends to the next booth to ask more about the major. Some workers, after a round of consultation, returned to the recruitment table, asking more carefully about working hours and insurance regimes.
Many parents stand behind their children, quietly listening, occasionally asking more: "Is it easy to get a job after studying?", "Is there a place to live if you work far away?".
The job fair combined with introducing the online job exchange in 2026 of Lang Son province was organized with a scale of more than 2,000 participants, with 28 businesses and training institutions present at 30 booths.
Not only direct recruitment, the event also includes career guidance activities, introducing online job exchanges, signing and sharing labor market information between job service centers in the Northern region.
In many booths, students ask quite carefully about the output after training. Meanwhile, workers are more interested in the actual monthly income, job stability, working conditions in the province or outside the province, and opportunities to work abroad.
Speaking at the festival, Ms. Tran Thanh Nhan - Vice Chairwoman of Lang Son Provincial People's Committee - frankly acknowledged that the province has an abundant labor force, but the quality of human resources is not uniform. The proportion of trained workers with degrees and certificates is only about 30%, while the work of connecting labor supply and demand is still inadequate. According to her, this is a bottleneck that needs to be removed soon to meet the development requirements of the province in the coming time.
That "bottleneck" is actually not unfamiliar. It is right in the story of many mountainous localities, where there is no shortage of young labor, but to transition from "having people" to "having quality human resources" is a long road.
For Lang Son, this problem becomes even more urgent as the province is aiming for faster development, associated with border gate economy, services, industry and digital transformation. A locality that wants to break through cannot forever rely on unskilled labor, lacking skills.
Mr. Vu Trong Binh - Director of the Department of Employment, Ministry of Home Affairs - said that developing the labor market, improving the quality of human resources and labor productivity is an urgent requirement in the context that the whole country is moving towards the goal of high and sustainable growth. This is also one of the important pillars of the new growth model.
From that perspective, Mr. Binh proposed that Lang Son soon develop a specific plan to improve labor productivity; and at the same time have policies to support students, especially students in ethnic minority areas and students in difficult circumstances to participate in vocational training.
Localities need to better promote the role of the Employment Service Center in connecting labor supply and demand and advising on labor market development.
According to a report by the Lang Son Provincial Employment Service Center, in the first quarter of 2026, the unit provided labor, employment, career orientation and job introduction advice to 6,748 people; 335 workers registered to find jobs, but the number of people introduced to receive jobs was only 100 people.
At the same time, the center's website had 3,842 visits, posting 41 news articles; the number of businesses' visits was 720, and job seekers' cumulative visits reached 2,241.
