European and Vietnamese Collaboration on Graduate EmploymENT

The reason for our project is the rising unemployment rates for university graduates in Vietnam. We have designed a project with activities carefully aimed at contributing to the situation. In our needs analysis we discovered that there is a lack of information on the real nature of the problem, and graduate unemployment is under reported in Vietnam. We therefore intend to design and implement a tracer study to map the exact nature of graduate employability in our partner universities. We plan then to feed the results back to the universities in order to reduce the gap between education and labour market demands. Once we have gotten results from the study, we plan to share our methodology of the tracer study with other Vietnamese universities, supported by the Vietnamese ministry of education.We also plan to create career centres at our partner universities in order to give students support in finding employment prior to graduation. As lack of soft skills has often been cited as a reason for lack of graduate employability, we plan to host seminars and workshops in raising awareness for soft skill development, lead by experts in the field. This activitiy will be arranged by the career centres.We see the continued need to keep gather data on relevance of education for the labour market, and will therefore create a web portal for students and graduates to use, which will collect data and will be sustainable once the project is over.