VietNamNet Bridge – Navigos Group on Monday announced its findings that labor supply growth in Vietnam continues to lag far behind demand, causing a continued labor shortage, particularly of qualified professionals.

The owner of Vietnam’s largest job website VietnamWorks.com said both labor demand and supply indexes have increased significantly, but labor supply is growing much slower than demand.

While labor demand in the second quarter of this year surged 42% on the previous quarter, labor supply rose a mere 30%, prompting increasing salaries and job-hopping among many skilled people, said Jonah Levey, chief executive officer of Navigos.

"The continued rise in labor demand is pushing salaries up, and also contributing to frequent ’job hopping’ on the part of overconfident jobseekers.

If things do not settle down soon, recruiting and retention challenges will seriously curtail the growth of Vietnam’s leading companies.

"Increasing human resource demand is a predictable result of robust economic growth, especially after Vietnam joined the World Trade Organization," he said, adding the increase in both labor demand and supply showed the labor market was getting hotter.

The remarkable matter in the second quarter demand index is the growth by volume in executive management from 524 jobs in the first quarter to 737 in the second one.

"Increasing demand of executive management shows that employers paid more attention to hiring managers due to Vietnam’s economic growth fueled by huge investment poured into Vietnam and rapidly increasing domestic consumer demand," said Tiffany Nguyen, the website’s strategic initiatives director and also author of the online employment indicator.

Navigos pointed out sales, accounting/ financing, information technology, administrative/ clerical, engineering, and marketing as the six top categories of labor demand.

The group revealed HCMC remained the leader in terms of job location distribution across Vietnam, accounting for 50%.

Labor supply began to rise again after two consecutive quarters of falling. The top categories in the supply index remained unchanged and listed as accounting/ financing, administrative/ clerical, sales, banking/ investment, executive management, and engineering.

(Source: SGT)