A longitudinal study about the employability skills of Vietnamese students

ABSTRACT: In a high tuition fee environment, International University (IU) and other Vietnamese universities have to compete with each other fiercely to survive and develop. This study was carried out to assess the improvement of the employability of IU’s students from 2011 to 2017, especially when IU has established many skills clubs. In this study, the ability of IU’s students was compared to the ability of students from other universities and also requirements of the labor market. The study’s results show that IU’s efforts have improved the employability of its students. However, IU’s efforts have made limited impacts and it is necessary to develop other approaches to solve the unemployment issue. This study is expected to bring many benefits to universities which have expensive training and education programs. Keywords: Competency dictionary, employability, longitudinal, skills club.

1. Introduction

Traditionally, Vietnamese education was for the elite. Only talented students could be admitted to state-owned universities.  The goal of these students was to look for a place in the public administration system or state-owned companies after graduation. Their living was then sufficient and their career advancement followed a smooth transition based on seniority. However, this is no longer true after extensive changes in Vietnam’s socio-economic system. The percentage of enterprises in the non-state owned sector has been increasing, and foreign invested companies have played a key role in the growing economy. As a result, state-owned companies have been facing stiff competition, and the public administration system had to adapt to the new trend. Life-time employment is no longer guaranteed, life-time learning is a must, and the best way to remain employed is to acquire new skills required in the labor market.

According to Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Welfare (2017), there were 218,800 (4.43%) unemployed Vietnamese graduates in 2016, and this figure has been increasing during the past few years. Many graduates who cannot find a job in Vietnam must go overseas to work through labor export programs for unskilled workers. Simply put, the “products” of Vietnam universities have not been accepted by the local labor market. In response to that, Vietnamese education has been desperately changing to meet the domestic and international labor demands of the growing economy. The common countermeasure for almost all universities in Vietnam is to set up “advanced” programs to keep up with the change. These program curriculum were adopted from high ranking universities all over the world and share common ideas where English is used as the means of teaching. The classes in these programs are small and well-equipped, the students have access to the most updated materials, and as a consequence tuition fees stay well above the normal, usually four or five times higher than average. International University (IU) – a member of Vietnam National University of Ho Chi Minh city – has been one of the pioneers in this trend since its establishment in 2003. IU has always been aware that its long-term success relies on how the labor market views its products, namely its graduates, and generic skills have gradually gained a more significant role in getting employed. Since its initial start, IU has encouraged students to participate in activities and competition outside IU to acquire more skills in addition to technical skills which can be acquired during class-hour activities, especially IU set up its first skills club with the aim to provide generic skills to students. This skills club helps IU’s students to form teams to participate in business contests. The skills and experiences acquired through these contests appear to be invaluable which attract more students.  With this success, and in order to meet ever increasing demands from the contemporary labor market, the number of skills clubs in IU has rapidly expanded to five in 2011 and a total of 20 at the end of 2016. Each skills club targets students’ different needs, which include how to improve presentation skills, sales/marketing skills, creative skills, networking skills, etc. Students are free to choose to become members of any club based on the skills which need improvement. One reason to explain the proliferation of these clubs is that it is measurable and totally under university control. However, these efforts to improve the employability for IU’s students are still in doubt. In other words, IU is likely to look for the answers to address the following management question

• “Are these efforts really of help to improve IU students’ employability skills?”

The answer for this question can be more crucial bearing in mind that the number of unemployed people with bachelor degree in 2016 is near 200,000 or equivalent to 18.3 percent of the total of unemployed people, and getting employed is the decisive factor for parents to justify the investment in choosing these high-tuition fee programs.

2. Literature review

There are many definitions of employability skills. Robinson (2000) defines “Employability skills are those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job”. Employability skills can be distinguished from occupational or technical skills by their generic nature. They can be applicable throughout various industries, business sizes, and hierarchical levels from the bottom line to the top management. According to Knight and Yorke (2005), employability skills can be understood as "A set of achievements, understandings and personal attributes that make individuals more likely to gain employment and to be successful in their chosen occupations".  In the viewpoint of CBI (2016), employability skills are “A set of attributes, skills and knowledge that all labor market participants should possess to ensure they have the capability of being effective in the workplace – to the benefit of themselves, their employer and the wider economy.” The terminology “employability skills” in this study represents transferable skills that people must possess to become “employable”. The term “employability skills” can also be referred to as “core skills” “key skills”, “professional skills”, or “career management skills” in various disciplines. The common attribute for all employability skills is that they can be learned. Put differently, employability skills can be acquired and developed progressively.

In addition to knowledge and qualification, employers usually require a set of skills from candidates for a specific position. Those skills are not sufficient but are a must for employees to perform at the best of their ability. Nowadays, no matter how good a graduate’s qualification is, he/she is very likely to compete with his/her equally well-academically qualified counterparts. Applicants can increase their chance of getting employed by showing these skills to their employers. Archer and Davison (2008) confirm that generic skills and personal attributes are more important than the degree qualification in getting a job. According to Adecco (2015), companies prefer high levels of generic skills to academic achievements in recruitment and selection. These skills can help employees to get along well with their colleagues and bosses, and provide good, logical solutions to problem-solving.

Many organizations view employability skills as their key to success under the pressure of rapid dramatic changes. However, the sets of employability skills for numerous positions can vary much from author to author, and context to context. Youth Central (2017) suggests the list of eight skills applicable across all industries, namely communication, teamwork, problem solving, initiative and enterprise, planning and organizing, self-management, learning, and technology. University of Kent (2017) mentions the following top ten skills: verbal communication, teamwork, commercial awareness, analyzing and investigating, initiative/self-motivation, drive, written communication, planning and organizing, flexibility, and time management. The comprehensive list of employability skills seems to be endless, and this poses a lot of difficulties to evaluate students across different majors and workplace. In order to overcome that obstacle, competency dictionaries come into use.

Competency was first defined as a personal attribute leading to successful performance (McClelland, 1973). However, researchers have continued to refine the term. Parry (1996) defines it as “a cluster of related knowledge, skills and attitudes (KSA) that affects a major part of one’s job (a role or a responsibility), that correlated with performance on the job, that can be measured against well-accepted standards, and that can be improved via training and development.” Lately, Sampson and Fytros (2008) describe competency as the fundamental attribute of the person which underlies the successful performance in a job.

The term “competency dictionary” refers to a reference work on competency which includes all or most of general competencies needed in a job family or all jobs in an organization. There are many competency dictionaries which are written by various organizations in different sectors, including the Behavioural Competency Dictionary of Organizational Readiness Office (BCD of ORO) in Canada, the Competency Dictionary of Harvard University, the Behavioural Competency Dictionary of British Council (BCD of BC), and the General Competency Dictionary (GCD) for the Public Sector of the Philippines Government. Different competency dictionaries can cover different lists of employability skills. Nonetheless, some dictionaries provide the proficiency scale while others do not. The decision to choose which competency dictionary as a tool for this study comes from its ability to quantitatively measure these skills. In other words, can we measure these skills using an(a) interval/ratio scale?  The answer is that competency dictionaries with proficiency scale should be selected. Taking this into account, the BCD of ORO, the BCD of BC, and the GCD are good candidates for this study.  However, the BCD of ORO provides proficiency scales of one to five whereas the BRO of BC, and GCD offers one to four only. That is to say the BCD can help to capture more information than the other two. In addition, each proficiency level is illustrated using behavioral indicators. Each competency scale is cumulative, that means all behaviors at lower levels are applicable at higher levels. This can help to significantly reduce the subjectivity in scale mapping for respondents.

The employability skills in competency dictionaries can be classified into “generic”, “technical”, and “job-specific” skills. In this research, we target all business students in IU regardless of their majors or industry sectors. Hence, it is quite inappropriate to cover all skills, but “generic skills”, which can be applied across a great deal of subject domains. The term “employability skills” and “generic skills” can be used interchangeably from now on in this study.

Over the last few decades performance management has been moving from outcomes-based approaches to competency-based ones. The inclination toward competencies makes it easier for employers to take employees’ behaviors into account while optimizing their performance for the sake of companies’ strategies and objectives. There are plenty of studies about the role of employability skills in helping students get employed worldwide (Asonitou, 2015; Baker & Henson, 2010; de Guzman & Choi, 2013; Rosenberg, Heimler, & Morote, 2012; Sarkar et al., 2016; Tsitskari, et al., 2017; Wickramasinghe, 2010; Wilton, 2011), and in Vietnam (Barker, 2014; Tran, 2017; Truong & Laura, 2015; Truong, Laura, & Shaw, 2016; Nguyen, 2011). IU has been trying hard to improve students’ employability with many newly setup skills clubs so that students can choose the most appropriate club to learn/hone new skills. Nevertheless, there are few studies about whether these clubs can really improve employability levels, and in Vietnam no such study has been conducted. In this case, a longitudinal study about students’ employability skills taking the number of generic skill clubs into account could shed the light into the management problem by breaking it into following questions

• How well do IU’s students meet the requirements in the contemporary labor market?
• How good are IU’s students in comparison with their counterparts in other advance programs?
• Do these clubs really improve students’ employability skills? Are IU’s students better at generic skills in comparison with the cohort in the past

3. Methodology

The BCD of ORO with the proficiency scale is used in this study as the instrumentation. There are 24 skills in this dictionary. The descriptions of these skills were translated into Vietnamese for easy understanding because English is not the first language in Vietnam.

A focus group was conducted among four IU business students, four IU graduates, and three employers/managers to scrutinize these skills, and they agreed to drop three skills ‘Developing Others’, ‘Impact and Influence’, and ‘Visioning and Strategic Direction’. However, the English skill was inserted. This is understandable as English is the first language for Canadians, but not for Vietnamese. The proficiency scale of International English Language Testing System (IELTS) was selected for instrumentation. The participants in this focus group also proof-read the Vietnamese version of these skills to ensure there is no error in wording or difficulty in understanding for respondents.

The final questionnaire includes the above 22 skills (see Table 1), which have proficiency scales from one to five. Each proficiency level is defined using behavioral indicators provided with the BCD of ORO, except the English skill levels are taken from the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). Each competency scale is cumulative which means that all behaviors at lower levels are included in higher levels but some behaviors at higher levels do not appear in lower levels. Before respondents answered the questionnaires, they had been explained about the scales’ attribute, and advised to choose the highest levels with behaviors that they possessed.

In the 2011 survey, data were collected from 70 IU’s senior business students, 44 IU business graduates who just graduated about one year, and 80 employers/managers in various organizations in Ho Chi Minh city and adjacent provinces. A group of voluntary IU students and the author distributed the questionnaires to the above respondents. The contact information of employers/managers was initially acquired through the author’s network and expanded with the help of snowball technique. In this 2017 survey, 98, 79, and 209 responses were received from the above groups, respectively. In addition, the author asked his friends who are lecturers in Hoa Sen University, University of Finance and Marketing, and University of Technical Education to distribute the questionnaires to their senior business students who have also been studying in “advanced” programs. The objective here is to see how well IU students have performed in comparison with their peers. The reason for choosing the three universities is that they share common points with IU:

• All of them offer high tuition fee business programs, and
• All of them have got quite sufficient resources and tried their best efforts for the sake of their graduates’ employment.

One hundred and eight responses were collected. The questionnaires were again distributed to employers/managers using snowball technique. It is easier this time (2017) because there are more IU alumni who are willing to help to forward the questionnaires to appropriate respondents in their network.

In this research, the following comparisons in all generic skills are conducted:

1. IU senior students (2017) vs. IU senior students (2011)
2. IU senior students (2017) vs. employers (2017)
3. IU senior students (2017) vs. students in other universities (2017)
4. Employers (2017) vs. employers (2011)
5. IU graduates (2017) vs. employers (2017)
6. IU graduates (2017): what they possess vs. what they expect to have to excel at their current positions

The employability skills score of each respondent is calculated as the mean of all generic skills. We compare the means of employability skills scores between two groups to determine which group is better at employability skills in general. The first five comparisons are done in that manner. We then go one step further to do comparison for these pairs at each generic skill. Independent sample T-tests are used in the above comparisons, except paired sample T-tests are used for the last comparison above.

4. Findings

*: statistically significant

Employability skills score = the mean of all generic skills of any member

Overall score = The average of all employability skills scores in any group

Table 2 shows that in general, IU senior students (2017) have a higher average score in employability skills than their cohort in 2011, and in particular, IU senior students (2017) show a significant improvement at five generic skills.

* : statistically significant

Table 3 shows that English is the most improved skill with the gap of 0.56*. However, the majority of skills (17) show no improvement. In particular, IU senior students in 2017 are at better at Decision Making and English skills other universities’ students in, but in general, IU senior students in 2017 do not have a higher average score of employability skills than their peers in other universities.

With the objective of becoming a leading university in Vietnam to provide highly competent labor sources, IU needs to equip its students with more skills at higher proficiency scale to stay ahead of the competition, especially in the context that the Vietnamese’s English proficiency level has been on the rise. In addition, IU senior students (2017) surpass the employers’ demand in English. This has made the gap between IU senior students and other universities’ students become less meaningful in the recruitment and selection process. Furthermore, IU graduates in 2017 think they are not good enough at all skills needed, except English to excel at their current positions. That is, getting employed is just the start, but being a mediocre employee hinders/stops him/her from career advancement or even costs him/her the job. This shortage in employability skills of university graduates in comparison with employers’ needs repeats outcomes from previous studies (Lim et al., 2016; Ramakrishnan & Yasin, 2010).

Overall, IU senior students in 2017 can meet the employers’ requirements in generic skills. However, further analyses show that these students fall short at five (5) skills by comparison with present employers’ requirements. Nonetheless, in general IU graduates (2017) are quite behind employers’ demand. The graduates fall short at 13 skills. This can give rise to one interesting question: “How can senior students get worse at generic skills after having more real-life practical experiences?” One possible answer is that IU senior students tend to highly evaluate themselves but they change their mind when facing practical problems at work. That is to say, solving a problem in a(n) academic/simulated environment is not the same in a working one.

Finally, the requirements of employers have been increasing. This study finds gaps between “2017” and “2011” in 13 skills. It is quite interesting that all five skills which are improved by IU senior students (2017) by comparison with the cohort (2011) are also required at higher levels by employers (2017) in comparison with employers (2011). This can be interpreted as IU students have been aware of the labor market trend, and trying to keep up with the change.

5. Conclusions and Implications

Nowadays, IU in particular and Vietnam universities in general should be aware of the employers’ hiring preference in competency and steer effort toward improving their students’ employability skills. The various newly setup skills clubs can partly help IU students get employed, but this is not sufficient. Skills clubs’ activities cannot totally replace real life problem solving, and this kind of research should be conducted regularly to help universities know how well they serve the skilled labor market. In addition, the mapping between the activities offered by skills clubs for skill improvement and the comprehensive list of skills in the competency dictionaries has not yet been done. Therefore, the following questions remain unanswered

• How is the overlap between clubs’ activities to improve skills?
• Whether do the skills clubs’ activities cover all skills needed for graduates to successfully enter the labor market?

For the time being, the majority of Vietnamese students do not have any knowledge about competency dictionaries, especially those students who have just entered tertiary education. They are unaware of neither the list of possible generic skills nor the proficiency scale for each skill. The consequence is that

• They do not know whether a skill is needed in their future career.
• If they know a skill is needed, they do really know whether they are sufficiently proficient, or they should put more effort to improve.
• They cannot set up a comprehensive list of skills needed with required proficiency levels to improve.
• They cannot set priority for each skill. Hence, they try to improve their skills by accident or by convenience.

Another striking point should be noted is that the comparisons between IU senior students (2017) and IU graduates (2017) with employers (2017) have many things in common. In the self-assessment of IU senior students (2017), four of five skills which should be improved are repeated in the self-assessment of IU graduates (2017). This could be understood as the assessment’s consistence thanks to the proficiency scales in the competency dictionary. However, this study indicates that senior students tend to be more generous when evaluating themselves. It reaffirms that overrating their own skills and over confidence have become common in present graduates (Papadopoulos, 2010). In other words, if they find themselves in the middle of two consecutive scales, they are inclined to “round up”. Table 1 illustrates this well when IU senior students (2017) thinks they fall short at only five skills but when facing reality IU graduates fall short at 13 skills in their self-assessment. That is to say, when facing reality IU graduates could round down their proficiency levels. The self-confidence in academic or simulation situations could be replaced by uncertainty or doubt while trying to work-out practical problems.

IU graduates (2011) exceed employers’ requirement (2011) at communication and English skills (Tuan, 2011). In this study, IU graduates (2017) are only better at English. It indicates the good practice of communication and English in IU. However, not only the shortages in three skills of Change Leadership, Networking, and Organizational & Environmental Awareness of IU graduates (2011) in comparison with employers’ requirement (2011) but also the shortages in other ten (10) skills are detected. This implies that the effort of IU to improve generic skills for its students cannot keep up with the increasing demand in the labor market, and the gaps seem to get bigger and bigger.

IU students’ prevailing strength is their English. Table 1 shows that IU senior students (2017) are further ahead of IU senior students (2011), better than their peers in other universities, and exceed the employers’ requirements at English skills. This also indicates that the English context in IU be well nurtured, and IU students are among the best in the labor market. Nonetheless, the study was only conducted in Vietnam and the need to master English skills is not a strong driver at the moment. If IU students look for a chance to study or work overseas this may no longer be true. For example, Malaysian students do fall short of English skills required by employers even English is quite commonly used in Malaysia (Lim et al., 2016)

The final observation is that IU graduates are inclined to think that they must improve all generic skills (except English) to excel at their current jobs in both studies in 2011 and 2017. This once again confirms that the IU’s effort to improve generic skills through many skills clubs is not sufficient. Manson, Williams, and Cranmer (2009) also say that many employability skills are better acquired in working environments rather than in classroom settings. Moreover, the effects of taught skills are quite strong at the beginning of graduates’ career but do not last long as graduates gain more job/occupation-specific skills through practical experiences. Furthermore, Jackson (2014) verifies it is not the sole responsibility of faculty to equip students with employability skills. Nguyen, Yoshinari, and Shigeji (2005) recommend that universities should set up centers to link students, alumni, and employers. These centers can serve as a vehicle to provide students with employability skills. Phillips (2007) also suggests forming a three-way partnership among universities, students, and employers to embed employability skills. Jackling and Natoli (2015) view internship as the vehicle to get students exposed to sophisticated tasks while developing generic skills.

For the time being, IU focuses much on knowledge education with its requirement of all business students to complete a thesis for the degree of Bachelor of Business Administration. Nevertheless, generic skills have not been given top priority. This current study shows that it is absolutely crucial for IU in particular and other “advanced” programs in general to conduct this kind of research regularly, and take serious actions to improve. It is a must for these programs to survive and thrive.

Although the above discussion focuses on IU in comparison with other universities and the labor market, it is worth mentioning that this study was implemented in a high tuition fee environment. Therefore, all conclusions and implications in this study could be generalized to any university which provides high tuition fee programs. For the time being, all universities in Vietnam have been offering at least few kinds of high tuition fee programs, and the number of these programs has been increasing. Moreover, universities which traditionally offer low tuition fee programs could be under much more pressure if they want to start high tuition fee programs because it takes time to create a new image and build up credibility. Hence, they would try harder to get their “products” accepted in the skilled labor market. Regarding the above reasoning, this study’s outcome could appear to be useful to almost all higher educational institutions in Vietnam.

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NGHIÊN CỨU  THEO THỜI GIAN VỀ KỸ NĂNG TUYỂN DỤNG CỦA SINH VIÊN VIỆT NAM TS. Nguyễn Minh Tuấn Khoa Quản trị Kinh doanh - Trường Đại học Quốc tế,  Đại học Quốc gia Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh TÓM TẮT: Trong môi trường học phí cao, Đại học Quốc tế (IU) và các trường đại học Việt Nam khác chịu sự cạnh tranh rất khốc liệt để tồn tại  và phát triển. Nghiên cứu này nhằm điều tra xem các kỹ năng tuyển dụng của sinh viên IU đã được cải thiện như thế nào từ năm 2011 đến năm 2017, đặc biệt trong bối cảnh IU đã thành lập rất nhiều câu lạc bộ kỹ năng. Nghiên cứu này cũng so sánh sinh viên IU với các trường đại học khác và yêu cầu của thị trường lao động. Kết quả cho thấy những nỗ lực của IU đã cải thiện các kỹ năng tuyển dụng của sinh viên. Tuy nhiên, tác động của chúng khá hạn chế và cần có nhiều cách tiếp cận mới hơn để giải quyết vấn đề thất nghiệp. Nghiên cứu này có thể đem lại nhiều lợi ích cho các trường đại học cung cấp chương trình đào tạo với học phí cao. Từ khóa: Từ điển năng lực, khả năng tuyển dụng,  theo thời gian, câu lạc bộ kỹ năng.