Japan ICT Day is an annually important event organized by Vietnam Software and IT Services Association (VINASA) and Vietnam – Japan IT Cooperation Club (VJC) aiming to promote Vietnam – Japan IT collaboration with theme “Digital Transformation: The new era for Vietnam – Japan IT cooperation”. The event was first organized in 2007 and is the best platform for Vietnam and Japanese companies to seek for business cooperation during the past 9 years. The event gets strong support from the Governments, associations, organizations and especially businesses of the 2 countries.
According to the estimation of the Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Indusy (METI) in 2016, by 2019, the number of Japanese IT engineer will be at the peak of more than 920,000 and then start to decline. Meanwhile, the demand will continue growing, resulting in the shortage of workforce in this field.
At present, Japan is lacking in average of more than 100,000 IT engineers, by 2020, this number will increase to 230,000 and to 2030 of 590,000. Fields such as information security, cloud computing, mobile are having serious shortage in terms of both quantity and quality. At the same time, the highest demand for IT personnel comes from Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), big data and robotics.
The report also showed that, the number of Vietnamese Information & Technology (IT) engineers working in Japan IT sector only contributes to 4% of the total number of foreign engineers, staying behind China with 53% and Korea with 15%, but the growth rate has increased to 258%, the highest number among Japan’s partners.
The issue with IT personnel has been discussed in detail in the session “Develop high quality human resources of new trend technologies for Vietnam – Japan cooperation”. As such, guest speakers at the conference are leaders of big IT companies from Vietnam and Japan, such as Softbank, NTT Data, FPT, Luvina and JTS. All have agreed that enterprises and training centers in both countries have had many cooperation programs and strategies to develop human resources in terms of quantity and quality. IT enterprises are cooperating closely with universities, not only to specifically order training requirements, but also to directly cooperate with universities in developing teaching methods and materials.
In particular, some Vietnamese enterprises are cooperating in developing and researching new aspects such as IoT, AI, robotics and big data. This is a solid foundation and prerequisite conditions for a new era in Vietnam – Japan IT cooperation. Vice Chairman of VINASA Nguyen Doan Hung said, the industrial revolution 4.0 and new technological trends such as IoT, AI, big data, digital transformation, new model of business cooperation and the abundance of Vietnam’s labor force will open new doors for the future cooperation of Vietnam – Japan IT.
Also at the conference, experts said, 80% of the current cooperation programs between Vietnam – Japan in IT are mainly for outsourcing and offshoring, however, according to survey conducted by VINASA and enterprises cooperating with Japanese enterprises, the number of cooperation programs in fields of high technology and research & development is increasing. As such, the understandings of Vietnamese enterprises with Japanese partners have also improved. For Japanese enterprises, there are significant changes, from working in Japanese only, as of now, many have work relation with Vietnamese enterprises in English.
Also within the framework of Japan ICT Day 2017, VJC has signed Memorandum of Understandings (MoU) with Okinawa Association of Digital Content (OADC), with the expectation of facilitating cooperation between enterprises of the two countries in digital content – a priority aspect of both Vietnam and Japan, which in need of better cooperation between two sides.
