Vietnam’s Blockchain Industry Faces Shortage of Talent

The booming blockchain sector in Vietnam is having to deal with a serious deficit in specialists, local media revealed. Despite the large number of software engineers in the country, those with blockchain expertise meet less than a fifth of the current demand, with businesses already looking for talent abroad.

Vietnam is facing a lack of human resources hampering the advance of projects in its rapidly developing blockchain industry, the English-language portal Bizhub reported. The Southeast Asian country has plenty of capable software developers but few of them have the needed qualifications for distributed ledger technologies.

The shortages makes recruitment difficult and Vietnam doesn’t have many training programs to alleviate the problem, noted Trinh Ngoc Duc, chief executive of the company that developed the Fight of the Ages game. Quoted by the news outlet, he elaborated:

The scarcity of experienced blockchain programmers affects the product development process and leaves many potential projects unimplemented.

The deficit of blockchain specialists is already seen in many industries, including finance, education, healthcare, logistics, and agriculture. More than 50 sectors of the Vietnamese economy have started to apply blockchain solutions, with around 600 projects just in the Gamefi industry.

At the same time, existing talent can only meet between 15 and 20% of the demand, according to Kevin Tung Nguyen, CEO of Jobhopin. He, himself recently lost three employees who were offered payment three times higher than their remuneration at his company. The market is thirsty for blockchain programmers and competition for them is becoming fiercer, he commented.

Sourcing talent has become a major problem for many firms in Vietnam’s blockchain space which has been growing fast, confirmed Nguyen Thi Ngoc Dung from the National Innovation Center. Some companies have started to look for programmers in other countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, India, South Korea, and in Europe, she added.

Dung believes that one of the reasons is that Vietnamese universities are not teaching blockchain. She also thinks that innovation centers and successful startups should launch their own short-term courses for students and expand international cooperation.

A survey conducted by the Vietnamworks recruitment platform among more than 1,000 people working in the IT industry has revealed that blockchain engineers get the highest salaries. But Vietnam is not the only economy experiencing difficulties with finding enough blockchain talent. According to the professional social media network Linkedin, job postings with the keyword ‘blockchain’ in the U.S. increased by almost 400% in 2020-21.

Do you think Vietnam will be able to compensate for its deficit in blockchain developers through training programs? Share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section below.