Labor market forecast to cool down

13:10' 02/05/2008 (GMT+7)
The human resource advisory services director of Navigos Group has forecast Vietnam's labor market with generally cool down this year given better supply and a foreseeable salary easing for certain industry categories.

Winnie Lam of the Vietnam's leading recruiting and integrated human resource solutions provider said companies now had better choice for employees as a lot of training companies had joined the market.

Lam used the finding of Navigos Group's quarterly Vietnam Online Employment Indicator Report to show that supply in all industries/categories in the first quarter of 2008 grew over 40% higher than the last quarter of last year, marking the largest growth of total supply in the last five quarters. Meanwhile, the demand index rose by 17%.

"It is interesting to see the labor supply-demand gap start to narrow," Lam said.

She added that this year would see salary slowing down for some industries, including finance, which was the hottest category last year, and the fact that employers were becoming more cautious about salary competition.

Lam said some categories Including retail banking would remain "very hot", and the result is that employees continue to ask for higher salary. Moreover, salary will not slow down in the new technology and management areas where highly-skilled people are still in need.

However, salary in Vietnam was generally lower than in other regional countries and the costs were still reasonable, Lam told the Daily after a news briefing that Navigos Group held here on Monday to announce the launch of Vietnam Salary Survey 2008.

This year, the group includes a broader range of job categories in the survey to capture the growth in the country's ever-changing labor market. The 17 new job groups and a total of 75 in all help the survey cover almost every job category in the Vietnamese market.

The addition enables the final report to be more extensive, and helps companies analyze and compare gross salaries, net salaries, bonuses, allowances and benefits for hundreds of different positions.

The first such bilingual-version survey for both English and non-English readers will continue the competency-based approach, as in the previous report's format, placing emphasis on analyzing company and individual data.

Lam said more than 60 companies across Vietnam had committed to join the survey. The target is 200 large and small companies from different industries and economic sectors throughout the country.

Navigos Group will release the final survey in the third quarter of 2008 before annual salary reviews and adjustments to help answer critical questions regarding remuneration and measure a company's competitiveness in the labor market.

"A clear understanding of competitive, industry-specific salary levels is critical in shaping a company's talent pool in the current market," Lam said.

Navigos Group launched Vietnam Salary Survey in 2005. Last year, the survey attracted the participation of 156 foreign-invested and local companies, with collective data from 28,000 employees in 11 major industries.

Navigos Group's Vietnam Salary Survey 2008 is open for companies to register their participation until July 12 this year.