Voyage Project: description

The project is a bottom up approach that starts from the graduates and its university, for modernizing and developing the higher education (HE) sector within society, strengthening the relations between university and enterprises and improve in turn the quality of HE in place. Current  information in Vietnam are in fact rather scattered for a continuous and effective monitoring on the training system, the labor market, and the link between them, and to forecast skills requirements of the labor market needs.

The creation, thanks to the project, of modern and sustainable tools based on the provision of updated information for the enhancement of university-enterprises partnership, is highly needed in Vietnam where, the education system has seen important development in the last 10 years with the number of schools doubled and an increase state expenditure (World Bank, 2014) and,  as regard to higher education, a marked increase in the number of graduates (Vietnam Statistics Office, 2014). Yet, as in other part of the word, graduates are facing the dual problem of increasing youth unemployment and a mismatch between graduates’ skills and employers’ requirement often ascribed to the poor quality of education (ICEF, 2014,).

The project, thus, will support Vietnamese Universities in identifying instruments and methodologies to improve the effectiveness of education system through the implementation, at local level, of a graduate’s database system that, following the AL model in Italy, pursue two main goals:

• provide an efficient tool to Universities and Government for the monitoring of long lasting impact of HE on society and improving educational supply accordingly;
• support employability and collaboration between education and business sector.

The system (online platform developed on the graduates DB) will allow enterprises to search for graduates to employ according to specific skill needs, giving the graduates a comprehensive and democratic access to labour market. The graduates data platform will enhance  the linkage between education and socio-economic partners, the reform of curricula in line with labour market needs, the enhancement of the whole HE system’ efficiency, the production of documentary evidence (the first graduates’ profile survey in the beneficiaries universities)  for decision making and policy. Voyage Project will also put the baseline for the Consortium of the Vietnamese Universities’ creation, as future project sustainability, while competence provision and capacity transfer stay as pillar project goal provided at all levels and to university staff from the administrative to the IT and researchers.

Training of University staff will be performed on all aspects, from IT development to DB promotion, within students communities and towards the business sector to ensure project sustainability. Identification of instruments and methodologies on how to use the indicators and the statistical data will be provided during specific training sessions. All the project results will be largely diffused through international conferences, meetings, publications and a web site.

The project is expecting to have a long term impact of the whole socio-economic system and society envisaging as beneficiaries: the young and the graduates, the universities and decision makers, the Vietnamese business community. Thus the Voyage project will provide beneficiaries with facilitate job intermediation and demand/supply matching of the young and qualify labour, help ameliorating the unemployment issue and also the underemployment of graduates (which stays as a serious problem for the young in Vietnam) and at the same time trying to understand the needs of the labour market’ stakeholders in terms of skills.