How will Vietnamese youngsters benefit from WTO?

Dao Duc Quan, Director of Viet Joint-stock Media Company VietComs: “More opportunities for companies of young entrepreneurs to attract capital.” 

I think that Vietnam has been a very small market, which has not been able to catch the eyes of big companies in the world. WTO admission will further focus the world’s attention o­n the country. This therefore will create chances for young entrepreneurs in new business areas, especially in the media industry. 

In fact, big companies in Vietnam have built partnerships with international companies. For the smaller o­nes, having business partnerships with international companies has seemed unreachable. However, when the “door opens”, many international companies will come here and they will bring with them capital which “young” enterprises in Vietnam would love to have. 

We also understand that we need to find ways to thrive in a more competitive business environment; otherwise bankruptcy is the foreseeable result. We therefore need to better train human resources and management so that the integration will offer us more support than harm. 

The challenges that young entrepreneurs will face will be that they either get the chance to quickly expand their businesses or will they will be quickly left behind by the competition. 

PhD Nguyen Dac Vinh, Lecturer of the Faculty of Chemistry, Hanoi National University, Secretary of the university’s youth association: “The young will learn how to shorten the way to develop and to wait for opportunities in front.” 

Better integration into the world will provide Vietnamese youngsters with more opportunities to learn more knowledge and experience from more developed countries. This will shorten the distance that the young have to go to improve their knowledge. 

I think Vietnamese students have very good potential and are not “behind” students from other countries. This explains why when studying abroad, Vietnamese students are just as good as students from other countries. However, when they come back here to work they are left behind in comparison to foreign youngsters. This is obviously because the working environment here does not provide them with opportunities to apply the knowledge they learn overseas.  

I do hope that WTO membership will give us more chances to prove our abilities. This is what I expect the WTO to bring to us. 

Hoang Anh Tuan – Director of Hanoi Branch of Sacombank: “The tradition of older is better and wiser will no longer work.” 

The WTO is the turning point for many young entrepreneurs. Our customers mostly are young private companies. I think with the new “turning point” they will have more opportunities to expand their businesses and cooperate more with international companies as well as to promote their exports, with more customers interested in doing business with them. 

We as a bank will benefit from that. I do believe that the young nowadays have knowledge and will not have to work under the imposing tradition of “older is better and wiser”. If a young worker does well he or she will immediately be recognised and doesn’t need to be older. 

The young people therefore will have more chances to develop in terms of working in positions of managers or scientific researchers. 

Hoang Trong Thanh, student of the School of Technology, Hanoi National University: We have chances to “cope with hot time”. 

We understand that the time for the country to be fully recognised will be more than five years or even longer. This means that young people who are currently students will be the o­nes to directly deal with what should be called the “hot time”. 

We have the same thinking as other people: We will benefit from deeper integration. However, we need to overcome challenges to get more benefits from integration. 

People have said that after Vietnam joins the WTO there will be an investment wave into the country. This will provide Vietnamese people with more job opportunities, and chances to learn from big corporations. This definitely will be good for us, as with deeper understanding we will play our primary roles in a better way in the WTO time. 

If I talk about studying, I think Vietnamese students will get more advantages, such as better studying conditions, chances to study abroad, financial support from big companies, under a plan to come back to work for them. 

Students will also have chances to be trained through working or practicing with big companies. The government I think will have appropriate policies to have better human resources who have enough knowledge to work in the system or to provide human resources for international investment projects. 

No international investor would be interested in Vietnam if they thought that the human resources here did not meet their criteria. Students are the human resources for their companies, factories in the next five years or seven years, but they will also be the customers who will use the services provided by these foreign investors.