Mr Ha Minh Tran, Director of Cao Bang’s Labour and Social Welfare Department shares, “Cao Bang is home to more than 330,000 labourers, but they are at scattered locations and have limited education and professional skills. Low socio-economic status, poor education infrastructure, a shortage of teaching staff and inefficient teaching methods pose great challenges to Cao Bang.”
To provide vocational training for young people, leaders of the province have expanded already existing vocational centres and established brand new ones, raising the number of such facilities from four (in 2001) to ten (in 2007). The province has also given budget allocations for constructing and upgrading schools and teaching equipment. In 2001-2006, budget investments into constructing and upgrading schools, and purchasing equipment and aids for teachers amounted to VND40 billion, resulting in many successful trainees. During the past six years 19,026 students have been trained, 4,646 of which received long-term training. The proportion of labourers undertaking training courses has been raised from 6.1 percent (in 2001) to 12.3 percent (in 2006). Mr Mong Van Thac, Headmaster of Cao Bang Intermediate Vocational Training School, reveals that since its opening in 2005 the school has served 590 students with two long-term training courses and three driving courses. Currently, the school is training 400 workers for mineral exploitation projects and 50 for hydroelectric projects. Cao Bang’s vocational training services, however, are still limited. Meeting the enterprises demand for trained labourers is really a daunting task.
Currently, Cao Bang has just a small number of trained labourers, training quality is still low and not many graduates manage to get jobs. The system of schools and training centres still lacks effective teaching infrastructure, and just 5 of 10 centres are in operation. Centres are mostly in Cao Bang town area, not easily accessed by youths from remote areas. Around 30 firms in mineral exploitation and hydroelectric projects will begin operation along with other projects on agriculture, forestry, commerce and tourism, which is expected to create demand for tens of thousands of labourers. Cao Bang is, therefore, quickly consolidating its system of vocational training centres to meet these demands in terms of both quantity and quality.
In this context, Cao Bang is implementing its training system plan for the 2007-2010 period, pushing the pace of infrastructure and teaching equipment improvement at vocational schools and centres, especially at Cao Bang Intermediate Vocational Training School. The targets for the 2007-2010 period and the 2010-2015 period are to train 2,000-3,000 labourers/year (not including training given to farmers) and 4,000-5,000 labourers/year, respectively. These are quite high targets, requiring newer and more efficient direction and training methods.
In the future, vocational training must meet the demand for labourers in the area. To that end, Mr Ha Minh Tran said, “Changes must be made to raise the awareness of the importance of vocational training among officials, Party members and citizens; suggested methods must be implemented in a determined manner. We strongly believe that further improving previous achievements will help Cao Bang quickly overcome such obstacles, and create a new and highly qualified pool of human resources catering to the province’s development in the future.”
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In 2001-2006, Cao Bang generated jobs for 53,790 labourers, of which 24,730 were created through socio-economic development programs, 20,500 through the National Fund for Employment, 2,316 by domestic employment and 4,244 through employment export. In 2005, The department of Labour and Social Welfare consulted the Province’s People’s Committee on organizing the first Work Fair, helping 366 labourers find jobs.
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Vietnamese
