Tourism Human Resources Training: Hard-to-Reach Target

After the first national conference on demand-based tourism human resource training held in Ho Chi Minh City in 2008, the demand-based human resources training of the tourism industry has taken a new stride, actively contributing to the development of tourism.

 

The better outcome is attributed to the increase in training scale, the positive development of training fields, and the better condition of training facilities among others. Each year, tourism schools enrol 22,000 students, an increase of 22 percent from 2007) and grant graduations for 20,000 students. Primary and short-term vocational training tends to be on the rise. Training of masters, doctors and researches of tourism grows but in small scale. At the same time, tourism training establishments are mushrooming in major tourism localities.

 

Vietnam now has 284 tourism training establishments, including 62 universities, 80 colleges, 117 secondary vocational schools, two companies and 23 vocational training centres - an increase of 3.5 times compared with 2007.

However, State management mechanism imposes many limitations on demand-based tourism personnel training. The State management apparatus on tourism human resources development and training at the central level is not strong enough while that at the local level is weak in both quality and quality. These restraints even exist in major tourism localities.

 

Training establishments are mainly located in large cities while the north-western, north-eastern, south-western and Central Highlands regions - the key tourism centres - lack training facilities. The current capacity of tourism human resources training network fails to meet the demand of the society, the capacity of training establishments is limited, trailing the demand, while the cooperation with businesses for demand-based training is very weak.

 

Giving reasons for these shortcomings, according to travel companies, training units do not know much of what the tourism industry needs, do not have general orientations and specific measures, and do not have proper statistics and scientific researches on human resources, training and demand of the tourism industry. Besides, investments for continued training or retraining are insufficient and inappropriate.

 

According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the tourism industry will need some 620,000 direct workers by 2015 and 870,000 by 2020. In the 2016-2020 period, the manpower demand of the hospitability sector will increase some 7 percent a year on average. At the same time, the country will also need 1.5-1.7 million indirect tourism workers by 2015 and 2.2-2.5 million workers by 2020.

 

According to delegates to the conference, to meet the demand for human resources, the tourism industry must continue to complete the legal framework for demand-based training, set up and boost the capacity of some demand-based tourism training units.

 

In the 2011-2015 period, the tourism must enhance the State management on demand-based training, build standards and standardise tourism human resources to match international standards. Specially, it needs to develop training networks, strengthen cooperation to balance and rationalise training to fit the demand of different localities and purposes and match the national tourism development strategy, accelerate the application of advanced sciences and technologies to research and statistical activities at the service of tourism human resources training and re-training purposes, mobilise and effectively use domestic and foreign finances, technologies, efforts and experience for demand-based tourism human resources training.