The unemployment rate among young laborers (aged 15-29) was 7.6% over the first quarter of this year, according to official data.

The figure is 3.4 times higher than the overall rate (2.25%), Deputy Minister of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs Le Van Thanh told a forum on Friday.

He said the rate is not alarming compared to that of the region and the world, but it reflects a mismatch between labor supply and demand.

"We need to identify whether or not the low quality of young laborers is the cause, in order to create a solution to help them," said Thanh.

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The country currently has 10.8 million young workers, accounting for 21.4% of the labor force, which is "an abundant and potential source of labor supply," he said.

Of the population of young workers, 69% work in industry and services, and two-thirds are working abroad. Most of those abroad work in high-income markets such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan.

Thanh acknowledged that young workers face many challenges as not many are trained and new graduates lack soft skills in general.

Some solutions on getting job for young people:

Firstly, education in Vietnam is currently not linked to training and demand. Enrollment quotas are set by each school to meet the teaching needs but do not reach the actual employment demand by industry. Therefore, the number of students graduating every year is much higher than the actual needs as well as the number of student surplus will be unemployed. The cost of training a student to complete the entire course is not small, so when the student is unemployed for a few years after graduating as a case where their knowledge gradually decreases. That mean most efforts and money invested is wasted. In addition, in previous years, many new universities have applied for the establishment. The schools also applied to open branches in different localities in order to go up the enrollment quotas. However, this expansion is large to increase profitability without aiming to improve teaching effectiveness; it leads to raising the number of unemployed students. As a result, a new education model which has the interaction between theory and practice need to build. Specifically, the school should link with the enterprise to create the employment opportunities for students in order to help them to see the real skills in working as well as improve their professional knowledge. It is essential for students to quickly grasp the nature of the work they have chosen.
 

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After that, the legal bodies should implement the policies to solve the employment of young people by target groups. For youth groups who graduate from universities, colleges, and vocational secondary schools, they should be used in the economic sectors which have the high requirement of labor quality, preferential policies and employing talents. For those youngsters who have finished school, they have no conditions to study higher, so they need the policies to support vocational training, career development, and agricultural production. In addition, the industrial zones should be developed in order to attract a lot of laborers who are not highly qualified for works. To give the priority to send laborers for working in the direction of expanding the market, encouraging the development of household economy and creating jobs among youth. For the unemployed youth group, it is the necessary to encourage the development of private economic sectors, small and medium enterprises, individual business households and small businesses to attract more labor and create jobs for them. To adopt the policies to support and create favorable conditions for unemployed youth to access the preferential loans for self-employment and to increase income for youth in order to improve their living standards.
Finally, the government should have policies in completing the unemployment insurance system to support unemployed. There is a fact that, unemployment insurance may support to ensure the lives of workers as well as provide the helping for them in order to find out a job and return to work soon as soon as possible. Besides, unemployment insurance also helped to reduce the burden on the budget of states and enterprises. In Vietnam, due to unemployment situation just being acknowledged in recent years, so the establishment of the unemployment fund is in the early stages of research and has many difficulties as well as complexities. One of the difficulties is the source of the fund, determining beneficiaries and the entitled time. In the short term, due to the fund's limitations, unemployment insurance is intended only for people who lose their jobs and only cover for a certain period of time while workers are still unable to find a job. In the farther future, unemployment insurance is necessary for both young and old who do still not look for the job.

***Unemployment is always a central issue in every societies and economy; especially, in the present time when the speed of socio-economic development is increasing rapidly. Unemployment has always existed in many countries, including developed and developing countries for most of their developmental stages. In Vietnam, that situation has arisen since the country was transformed into a market economy. To compare with the world, although the unemployment rate of Vietnam in recent years is still a modest figure, the serious problem has arisen from the high unemployment rate among youth. Moreover, when the country is entering the golden population structure, youth unemployment is a real social problem, a challenge of development, a loss of opportunities to work, compromising the spirit and binding the capacity of those who are raising many good aspirations for their own bright future and their country. Obviously, young graduates will have to face more competition. 

Unemployment insurance policy has been regarded as an important tool to administer the labor market, aiming to build a competitive, high-quality one that operates in a transparent and effective manner. In order to properly perform this role in Vietnam at present, unemployment insurance policy should be instituted in the general socio-economic development program as well as social, insurance, labor and wage policies, thereby materializing the undertaking that nobody will be left behind in the course of building a prosperous and happy society.
Unemployment insurance constitutes an important social policy in the social security system, which contributes to the achievement of social progress and justice as well as sustainable national development. It serves as an important instrument of the labor market policy. It not only secures the partial compensation for job losers’ incomes but also actively supports the job retraining and recommendation for laborers to early return to the labor market. Meanwhile, employers are given various incentives to receive and retain employees as long as possible, particularly disadvantaged ones.

So, in the coming period, efforts should be concentrated on the following matters:

Firstly, the improvement of unemployment insurance management must be incorporated in the overall program on reform of social insurance, labor, wage and other relevant policies based on the state policies on socio-economic development, labor and employment.

Secondly, to further strengthen and develop the system of unemployment insurance implementation organizations towards neatness, efficiency, effect, and modernization in order to earn the confidence of, and better serve, the unemployment insurance participants and beneficiaries.

Thirdly, to revise the Employment Law, the unemployment insurance policy and the employment policy toward attaching importance not only to overcoming consequences for the unemployed via payment of unemployment allowances, provision of job counseling and recommendation, and job learning support but also to the application of measures to prevent and minimize unemployment through supporting enterprises and laborers to maintain jobs, ensuring their lawful rights and interests and coordinated review and assessment of the materialization of unemployment insurance policy.

Fourthly, to promote the core value of the unemployment insurance policy, namely job counseling and recommendation, vocational training and job maintenance; to further consolidate and better the operation of employment service organizations.

Fifthly, to comprehensively renovate public information contents, forms and methods suitable to the peculiar characteristics and nature of different groups of unemployment insurance participants in different regions and areas to ensure effectiveness of this work