HCM City (VNS/VNA)- Vietnam needs to improve the quality of itstechnical and vocational education and training to meet the requirements ofdigitisation and industry 4.0, a conference heard in HCM City on September 18.

Truong Anh Dung, Deputy General Director ofthe Directorate for Vocational Education and Training, said technologicalbreakthroughs in areas such as digital printing, robotics, artificialintelligence, nanotechnology, the Internet of Things, and self-driving cars arechanging the automation and production processes globally.

This presents a chance for Vietnam’seconomy and a challenge to its technical and vocational education and training(TVET), he said.

“Many old jobs are lost and many new jobsare emerging, requiring occupational profiles to be changed.”

Automation would change skill requirements,with low skill levels being no longer suitable, he said.

According to delegates, digitaltechnologies will transform the nature of future jobs.

The greatest impact would not be from jobloss but from changes in tasks that would require technical skills/knowledge,human skills and digital literacy, they said.

Today’s skill levels are insufficient forthe jobs, they said.

Wendy Cunningham, lead economist in theWorld Bank’s social protection and labour practice, said workers would need toconstantly upgrade skills to complement and not to be replaced by machines.

“Occupations will generally stay the samebut the skills content of jobs is changing, even in the simplest jobs.”

Skills to complement technology areuniquely human (higher-order cognitive thinking, socio-emotional skills) andrequired for interacting with technology (digital literacy), she said.

Dr Vu Xuan Hung, Director of the departmentof formal training at the Directorate for Vocational Educational Education andTraining, said: “It is necessary to drastically reform training delivery andschool management.”

The “Inertia” of many years of supply-orientedtraining with inflexible curricula and out-of-date training methods hinderssuch reform, he said.

Besides, it is necessary to reform trainingmethods through application of information and communication technology, hesaid.

It is necessary to drastically change to a“market-oriented” and “future market-oriented” training model, but to do thatthe linkage between vocational training organisations and enterprises must beenhanced, he said.

Prof Dr Georg Spöttl, director of theSteinbeis Transfer Centre InnoVET at University Bremen, Germany, saiddigitisation, networking, handling of intelligent systems, and software-aidedimpact on production facilities would be a new cross-sectional requirement fortraining.

The qualifications of TVET staff includingteachers, instructors and trainers also need to be improved, he said.

The conference, with the theme “HowIndustry 4.0 is shaping the future of the technical and vocational educationand training sector”, was organised as part of a partnership between Bosch, theDirectorate for Vocational Education and Training, LILAMA 2 InternationalTechnology College, and German development agency GIZ.

The partnership is supported by thedeveloPPP.de programme of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperationand Development.

The conference, which focused on the impactof Industry 4.0 and digitisation on the skill requirements for workers in Vietnam,offered recommendations to policy makers, businesses and vocational traininginstitutes.

It also featured the signing of anagreement between LILAMA 2 International Technology College and nine other TVETinstitutes for transferring the results of the partnership, such as theindustry 4.0 training module, to TVET institutes throughout the country.

Andreas Siegel, the German consul generalin HCM City, said Germany and Vietnam have been closely co-operating in thefield of education and training for the past years.

Technical and vocational education andtraining is one of the three priority areas in their collaboration, he said.-VNS/VNA