A wave of reader responses about candidates with impressive CVs who continually fail interviews in Vietnam has exposed an unresolved contradiction: the gap between schools and the labor market continues to widen.
Many readers point out that young candidates often emphasize academics while lacking practical skills, submitting the same CV to multiple companies without checking compatibility with each position or company culture. Some even overvalue themselves compared to their actual abilities — demanding high salaries, rejecting lower positions, yet lacking qualifications for senior roles.
Conversely, other readers counter: in Ho Chi Minh City, minimum living costs have reached 8 to 10 million dong per month, while wage levels are declining. Businesses also tend to hire one person to do the work of an entire department — what one reader with 15 years of experience calls the "Sun Wukong" style of recruitment. Many opinions agree this is a system failure, and cannot be blamed entirely on young people.
A beautiful CV is only a sufficient condition — the necessary condition is that candidates are ready to create real value for the business.
Analysis
This debate is not unique to Vietnam — but Vietnam's context makes it especially acute.
Vietnam's university system still operates on a one-way knowledge transfer model, where students learn to answer theoretical questions correctly but rarely face real-world situations. Upon graduation, they carry a polished CV but lack practical combat capabilities — the result of a system that has never truly connected closely with businesses.
Businesses are not blameless either. Cost-cutting pressure from the difficult economic period of 2023 to 2025 has driven many companies toward extremely lean hiring models — one person doing the work of three. In this context, hiring criteria are no longer qualifications, but the ability to start work immediately without training. A beautiful CV becomes a secondary factor.
The wage contradiction is genuinely difficult to resolve: businesses want to pay according to market capacity, but the market does not accurately reflect actual living costs — especially in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The result is a generation of young people caught between reasonable expectations about living standards and wages that cannot keep pace with inflation.
Diaspora Impact
Two groups within the Vietnamese American community have a direct connection to this story.
First, Vietnamese-origin families sending money home for their children to attend university or who have recently graduated in Vietnam — particularly in communities with large Vietnamese populations like Little Saigon (Orange County, California) and Houston. If their children face prolonged unemployment after graduation, the pressure to send monthly remittances will increase, while USD exchange rates and transfer fees remain unstable variables.
Second, Vietnamese-origin business owners in America who are expanding or establishing branches in Vietnam — a trend that has grown noticeably during 2023 to 2026 — will directly face the challenge of recruiting local staff who meet international standards while possessing practical skills. The gap between CV and actual combat capability is a real operational risk, not merely a cultural matter.