Hot Topic 8 - Graduates in new WTO era

Educators devise ways to make grads succeed in new WTO era

Nguyen Thien Nhan, Minister of Education and Training

As a member of the WTO, there are lots of challenges and opportunities ahead. Viet Nam’s education system hasn’t met our social needs. Therefore, Viet Nam recently organised an international forum where educators discussed how to train our young to meet employers’ needs.

Eight countries, including our own, participated in the talks.

During the forum, we found many countries are facing the same problem of developing programmes and training for students that get them jobs after graduating.

In order to address the problem, employers and universities need to work together to develop appropriate education strategies.

Companies need to inform universities about what they need from students, and in turn, universities must change their syllabuses to meet those criteria.

We’re also trying to improve the skills of our university teachers. At present, only 13 per cent of the lecturers at our institutions have a PhD.

The Ministry of Education and Training (MoET) is hosting a series of teaching courses in English at nine universities across the country. We hope people take this opportunity to improve their abilities in the classroom.

In the next ten years, we’d like to see 20,000 lecturers with PhDs, accounting for 20 per cent of the total. To make this happen, we are planning to send lecturers to study abroad.

In addition, our schools need to focus more on teaching the English language. Right now, English at schools is still limited. We must find a way to teach our mother tongue and English so our students can communicate easily in both languages.

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