Viet Nam’s IT workforce is lacking in professional skills, experience and proficiency in foreign languages and the shortage is holding back the industry’s development.

This was according to Nguyen Thanh Tuyen, an official of the Ministry of Information and Communications, who told a World Information Technology Forum in Ha Noi that IT was a key industry in Viet Nam and training was a key part of its development strategy.

He told the three-day conference, which concluded yesterday, that Viet Nam planned to develop a large number of highly skilled IT workers and to accelerate information technology in socio-economic development and e-government by improving IT infrastructure and management capacity.

Tuyen said that despite many incentives for the development of the IT industry – in what was a relatively small IT market – administrative procedures were one of its biggest challenges and reform was sluggish.

He said the Government had called for urgency in simplifying administrative procedures and had approved a budget for a development strategy to 2015.

Among foreign speakers, South Korean ex-minister of information and communications Yang Seung-taik told the conference his country had outlined four development stages since the ’80s.

Korean IT industry contributed 30 per cent to the country’s GDP, he said. The number of handphones in Korea topped 43 million and 90 per cent of families now used broadband internet.

To achieve this, the South Korean government had developed a sustainable technology foundation, he said. Its e-government began in 1984 and South Korea was the first country to turn ADSL into a commercial product.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Minh Hong said the Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications Group had made great efforts to develop its communications infrastructure nation wide with its international telecommunications network allowing the country to connect with 240 countries.

The national telecommunications network included two cable systems with a capacity of more than 100Gb/s to ensure smooth communication in every situation, he said. The corporation had also introduced state-of-the-art technology for the next generation networking.