# **Introduction**

**Skills development is a key component of Vietnam’s future growth, but key elements of the skills development system need to be strengthened.** Vietnam’s labor market faces challenges as the continued growth of knowledge-based industries, digitization and automation, an urgent need to facilitate climate-friendly development, and population aging alter the types of skills that are demanded, the speed at which skills demands change, and the workers available to meet these demands. Recent research has highlighted the important role of skills development in Vietnam’s future growth (Cunningham and Pimhidzai 2018). But key elements of Vietnam’s skills development system must be strengthened. One foundational area that recent diagnostic work has revealed as a weakness is Vietnam’s labor market information (Mazza et al. 2019; Moroz, Nguyen, and Chu 2019b; Cunningham and Pimhidzai 2018). Vocational education and training institutions and providers of employment services lack the detailed information on in-demand skills that they need to develop curricula, advise students, and put jobseekers on the path to the right jobs.

**The Survey of Detailed Skills (SDS) is a first step in filling the gap in information on detailed skills in Vietnam.** Efforts in developing countries to profile occupational skills and tasks often draw on data from other countries, most frequently the United States’ Occupational Information Network (O*NET). However, using the O*NET database outside the United States requires the assumption that the occupational characteristics described in O*NET are consistent across countries. Research has shown that this assumption does not hold due to differences in tasks, skills, and production technologies, particularly in low- and middle-income economies (Caunedo, Keller, and Shin 2021; Lewandowski et al. 2021; Lo Bello, Sanchez-Puerta, and Winkler 2019; Alatas, Granata, and Posadas 2020). To avoid this, the SDS draws on O*NET and other proven methodologies and takes a countryspecific approach. The SDS asks workers in Vietnam about their tasks and skills for a set of occupations that are either in-demand or that are of strategic importance for economic growth. In doing so, the SDS seeks to generate practical, detailed information at the occupation level that policy makers and practitioners can use to inform their efforts to build skills in Vietnam. This report explains the SDS’s methodology, provides summary results for the 30 occupations targeted by this round of the SDS, and presents an example of a detailed occupational profile for one of these 30 occupations, Nursing Associate Professionals. The SDS has also spurred further investigation of skills in Vietnam, particularly those needed for green jobs (Doan et al. 2023).

**The SDS makes several contributions** . First, the SDS provides a comprehensive but also in-depth portrait of skill, task, and educational requirements for a set of detailed occupations in Vietnam. The SDS is among the first surveys to collect this information at the detailed occupational level in a developing country setting. This is an important step beyond relying on data collected in other (developed) countries. The collection of information about detailed skills means that these skills can be flexibly grouped into different categories (for example, socioemotional skills, digital skills, routine skills, interpersonal skills) as needed. The use of a consistent scale anchored to the time spent using or performing a skill or task yields a measure of skill and task importance that is easily interpreted. The SDS approach also has some advantages over collection of skill and task data via online job vacancy data, which has become common in recent years. In developing country contexts, online vacancy data tends to be biased towards higher-skilled digital-intensive occupations and jobs at firms that use the internet (CSC 2019; World Bank 2021). The SDS avoids this bias by selecting the occupations of interest, including low-skilled jobs, first and using a sampling frame based on Vietnam’s Labor Force Survey. Still, the SDS has some weaknesses. The SDS requires outlays on administering a survey. Initial data collection covered only 30 of the hundreds of occupations in Vietnam. Inclusion of all occupations with regular updating would require ongoing investment.

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