The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) has revealed that it is creating a plan to develop digital human resources that would support and bolster its national digital transformation goals.
The plan ‘Raising awareness, preparing skills and developing human resources for national digital transformation by 2025, with a vision until 2030’, calls for training in skills for digital transformation, digital technology, digital services and digital business. Essentially it is about building a core force and a network of specialists for digital transformation nationwide that would lead, organise and spread the digital transformation process.
The country’s leaders firmly believe that digital transformation is the key factor that underpins rapid, effective and sustainable digital transformation which would lead to the successful development of digital government, digital economy and digital society. The plan envisions the development of the digital transformation network at the national, ministerial and provincial levels and the need to select, train and offer practice to at least 1,000 specialists in digital transformation for different fields, branches and localities.
The training is designed around a cascade model where the specialists, in turn, will train officers at their agencies and organisations. This group will act as the core force to lead the national digital transformation process. The ministry believes that state agencies, organisations and businesses need to attach importance to providing short-term training courses in digital transformation skills and digital skills to their officers, civil servants and workers. An open online training system that offers open training courses in digital transformation skills, and IT application skills to civil servants, workers and people would also be critical to such a strategy.
To ensure adequate human resources for digital transformation, especially the development of digital society, the ministry feels that it is essential to teach digital skills in educational establishments at all levels. At least 50% of total education establishments from primary to high education levels need to have subjects in digital skills, digital technology as well as STEM/STEAM/STEAME education by 2025. The goal is to have 90% of all institutes offering this by 2030.
Vietnam also needs to promote training in digital technology, digital economy and digital society by opening new training majors, increasing the quotas for training engineers, bachelor’s degree holders and technical workers in digital technology (AI, cloud computing, IoT and Blockchain), digital technology application, digital economy (digital administration, digital business), and digital society (digital communication and digital society management).
Since its launch six months ago, the national digital transformation program built by MIC has driven digital transformation throughout localities, agencies and enterprises. For it to be sustained and successful, developing human resources for digital transformation is an urgent and important foundation.
Le Ngoc Han, director of the Quang Ninh Department of Information and Communications, said the provincial authorities have been advised to list the digital transformation training programs among regular, annual training programs for civil servants at ward/commune units and higher levels.
Digital transformation will be one of the compulsory modules in the training program applied to officers from hamlet, commune, and ward to district and town levels. Province will collaborate with institutes, schools, research centres, domestic and foreign partners and cooperate with Thai Nguyen University to prepare human resources. Many education establishments consider digital transformation as ‘converting universities into a miniature digital country’, where the teaching and assessment methods will change completely and everyone has lifetime study opportunities.
The Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology said it will continue expanding training scale and opening more training majors. In 2020, two new majors were opened, including Control Engineering & Automation (Robotic Orientation) and Fintech. It plans to open Data Engineering and IoT in 2021, and logistics and digital journalism in the near future.
At the national level, one of six issues for cooperation between MIC and the Ministry of Education and Training is joining forces to train and build outcome standards for digital human resources.