Finance & Banking resources shortage in Vietnam

Nov 20, 2007

You need to be a Finance & Banking student to work for a bank. And the banks also need people like you. I'm sorry, that's not quite true.

A recent article on VnEconomy ( Vietnam Economic Times ) discussed the shortage of human resources in the financial sector amid rapid growth of Vietnamese banks and stock brokerage firms. For years, the lack of human resources in Vietnam has been no new problem to anyone. So the article suggests the banks should set up their own training centers to cope with such scarcity. Agreed.

Having talked to different people working in foreign banks, I 've come to realize that it's not necessary to be a graduate from such majors as banking and finance to work for banks, especially foreign banks. It is because these banks have their own training programs and only require foundation knowledge from the newcomers. Contrary to my previous belief, people from my university, Foreign Trade University, are working for many banks in the whole country in many different divisions ranging from International Payment to Credit.

This is true thanks to the fact that a lot of banks have their own training programs and if you look at the job specifications posted on their websites, no prerequisite knowledge is required. Thus this creates equal opportunities for anyone coming from any education background.

With an annual expansion rate at 30 -40%, banks are rigorously dealing with its recruitment problems. Should they blame the universities that can only produce 11,000 students each year in comparison with around 15,000 needed employees? No, absolutely not. What they should do instead is to build a sustainable and effective in-house training program like that of any other foreign banks, or companies in general, and take in the brightest persons from top universities nationwide, give these smarties a chance to develop themselves internally.

This is so crucial to the fate of domestic banks, especially when the day the banking sector opens to all players internal and external. The difficulties Vietnamese banks are now facing is nothing compared to those that they may in the near future.

Things will sort themselves out the right way if people give the needed catalyst.