Japanese Language Education in Vietnam - Education and Industry

Education and Industry

Hanoi Foreign Languages University and the University of Foreign Trade establish regular elective courses in Japanese in 1973. Ho Chi Minh City's Saigon University followed with a course in 1975. A school in Huế also began offering a course in 1993, but it closed in 2001; a course at Danang's University of Foreign Languages was found in a 2002 survey by Niigata University. Schools such as Hanoi's Chu Van An High School and Ho Chi Minh City's Le Quy Don School began offering the language to senior high school students in 2003. Chu Van An School also extended its Japanese language teaching to its junior high school students later that year, making it the first school to offer a Japanese course to students at that level; aimed at seventh graders, the course met twice per week and used textbooks donated by the Japanese government.

The Vietnam Software Association (VINASA) foresee a major shortfall in the number of proficient Japanese speakers relative to the needs of their industry; they projected that 18,000 programmers would be needed if they hoped to meet their target of capturing 10% of the Japanese outsourcing market, but as of 2004, the country only had 500 information technology who could speak Japanese. The average salary of a new university graduate working in the IT industry in Vietnam was VND2 million/month as of 2006; a graduate with proficiency in Japanese could earn VND3.2 million/month in Vietnam, but with wages of Vietnamese programmers working in Japan through manpower agencies from four to twelve times that amount, most Japanese-speaking IT staff prefer to work in Japan.

Various tie-ups between industry and universities have resulted as companies seek to resolve their labour issues; VINASA are working with Hanoi's FPT University to set up a Japanese language programme for student's of the university's embedded software faculty, while Japanese software development corporation Sorun plans to open a Japanese language school in a joint venture with the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, with the aim of reducing their own shortage of engineers; they plan to sponsor the top 10 graduates to come to Japan to work at their Tokyo headquarters. Similarly, NEC set up a job centre to match Japanese-speaking people in Vietnam with Japanese companies seeking employees, aiming to find 300 employees by 2010; however, in 6 months, they only managed to match 8 people.