As the textile-apparel industry in Vietnam faces the dual challenge of maintaining its competitive edge while upgrading its value chain towards more sustainable and competitive growth underpinned by enhanced workforce skills and technological innovation, a strategic document provides targeted and actionable recommendations to guide these efforts.
- The paper—Towards a sector skills strategy for Viet Nam’s textile and garment industry: Priority skills needs, actions, and recommendations for education and training system—has been brought out by the International Labour Organization and Viet Nam Textile and Apparel Association.
FOCUS AREAS: The key areas of focus include enhancing the quality of human resources, aligning training and skills development with a strategic vision for the industry’s future, and addressing systemic challenges in the skills supply.
- The report highlights the importance of aligning training programmes with industry needs, fostering stronger partnerships between education and training institutions and businesses, and ensuring that policies support inclusive and gender-responsive training practices.
- Establishing a textile and garment industry skills council in the long-run, continued support to the newly established working group in the short-term and promoting enterprise-funded training are critical steps towards achieving the objectives, as also to foster collaboration among stakeholders, and enhance the relevance of training programmes.
Recommendations to meet system-level priorities
- Develop the sector’s skills strategy: Development of such a strategy should follow a bottom-up approach that encourages active participation of enterprises in articulating their needs and generating solutions to raise the bar on standards. The skills strategy should prioritise development of university and VET programmes that align with key trends and the sector’s vision including automation, digitalisation, green practices, sustainable development, and the circular economy.
- Address sector systemic priority needs: In the short-term, it is critical to improve stakeholder collaboration as well as training quality and relevance, assessment and quality assurance to improve support policies for education and training, expand access and underline its relevance and value to workers.
- Implement inclusive and gender-responsive training policies and practices: Develop inclusive and gender-responsive training and training support policies for reflection across all training institutions – public and private, central and local – to promote equal access to high-quality training, especially for women and those from remote, ethnic and economically disadvantaged communities. Community-based training methods should be utilised to provide technical and financial services, facilitating successful implementation of business-driven training activities
Other suggestions included:
- Improving financing for sector-specific skills and training; and
- Promote industry voice and participation in skills development
THE TEAM: The report was developed by Dao Quang Vinh, an ILO national consultant and former Director General of MOLISA’s Institute of Labour, Science and Social Affairs (ILSSA).
- Technical inputs: Souleima El Achkar, ILO international consultant. Additionally, a research team from the National Institute of Vocational Education and Training (NIVT) under the DVET, MOLISA, contributed to the research.
- The research was funded by the Governments of Japan and the Netherlands.
