The central provinces of Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue and the central city of Da Nang alone have some 200 tourist projects worth over VND50,000 billion, which proves the great potential for local tourism.

The region has over 40,000 tourist workers, 90 percent of whom are working in hotels and inns. Sixty percent of this workforce, which is increasingly getting younger, has taken vocational courses on tourism.

However, the quality of tourist workers and managers remains low and has not met the required standards. For example, only 42 percent of them can communicate orally in English at the intermediate level and there are dire shortages of workers who can speak such languages as German, Korean, Thai and Japanese.

In fact, nine educational establishments (including colleges and vocational schools) in the region provide about 3,000 tourism graduates every year. But most of them fail to meet the demands of enterprises because the schools recruit and train them hastily. Dinh Hai, Director of the Quang Nam Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, said: “Schools focus excessively on academic education without paying due attention to practical skills. That’s why graduates have failed to meet recruiters’ demands. Luxurious hotels and resorts often have to employ expensive general managers from HCM City or abroad.”

To address this problem, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism has recently planned to build a Da Nang-based tourism college with modern facilities and teaching methods in order to create a high-skilled tourist workforce.

The local Director of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Ngo Quang Vinh, said his agency will cooperate with enterprises to customize the training of human resources. “It’s imperative to train actually competent staff to develop tourism,” Mr Vinh affirmed.

Meanwhile, training establishments have made efforts to train regional and international-standard employees by expanding their training scope and diversifying their training methods, including cooperation with enterprises.

Duy Tan Private University in Da Nang has joined Thailand’s well-known Phranakhon Rajabhat University to train students of tourism bilingually since 2006. The acting rector of Duy Tan University, Le Cong Co, said that his university will build a hotel within its campus for students to practise their major. “Cooperation with foreign partners in training is an inevitable trend.”

Regarding labourers, a manager of a local hotel said: “The success of an employee in tourism comes from his continued studies because the reality is far different from what is taught at school.”

Central Vietnam, which is located at the end the East-West Economic Corridor, has many world cultural and natural heritage sites and beautiful beaches that have increasingly attracted both domestic and overseas tourists.