Japanese IT firms are willing to offer the high monthly pay of $1,500-2,000 to attract Vietnamese software engineers.

Vietnamese firms suffer a constant anxiety about the brain-drain as more and more IT engineers with fluent Japanese skills have left for Japanese invested enterprises.

Analysts have noted that the demand for IT engineers with fluent Japanese skills has been increasing rapidly since more and more Japanese software outsourcing firms have been flocking to Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the orders for software outsourcing have come in masses. As a result, domestic and foreign firms have been fighting for qualified workers.

Ta Son Tung, Managing Director of Rikkei Soft in Vietnam, said Japanese firms are willing to pay 2-3 times higher than Vietnamese ones to recruit qualified workers.

In Vietnam, new university graduates, who have Japanese language certificates and the bachelor degree at “average” can receive $600 a month. Meanwhile, Japanese could pay up to $2,000.

“It is very difficult to find the candidates with fluent Japanese skills. Rikkei Soft cannot find anyone so far this year, even though it has raised the offered salaries,” he said.

A senior executive of a Vietnamese invested firm said the biggest problem for domestic firms does not lie in the lack of orders, but in the lack of workers.

“It is easier nowadays to approach the Japanese market. However, we don’t have enough workers to fulfill the orders,” he said.

Tung of Rikkei Soft confirmed this, saying that his firm got enough jobs for the whole year 2014 just after attending the Vietnam IT Day in Japan, an important event held recently.

“The demand is big. But the workforce is still a problem,” Tung said.

Pham Thai Son, CEO of NTQ-Solution, also said that Vietnam has the opportunity to increase the software export turnover to Japan by two folds in 2014. However, it needs to solve the labor force problem to turn this into reality.

It is obvious that Vietnamese firms are less competitive with Japanese in terms of the pay they can offer to IT engineers. What should they do to attract qualified workers then?

Analysts believe that the best solution for domestic firms is training students themselves. NTQ Solution, for example, in 2013, supported eight students. Five of them have been recruited by the company.

“Candidates need to be good at both technology and Japanese,” Son of NTQ Solution said. “We encourage candidates to learn Japanese at foreign language centers, and we are willing to pay the tuitions for the foreign language courses.”

Some domestic firms have proposed the government and relevant ministries to set up the policies which aim to prevent Japanese firms from scrambling for Vietnamese engineers by offering high pay.

However, Truong Gia Binh, President of FPT, the Vietnamese largest technology group in Vietnam, has warned that Vietnam cannot ask Japanese not to pay high to recruit software engineers.

“The fact that Japanese firms are willing to pay $2,000 a month to Vietnamese engineers, the same pay level they offer to Japanese new graduates, showed that they are seriously lacking engineers to fulfill the orders,” Binh commented.