Vietnamese college graduates lack the ability to communicate in English and work as a team, delegates complained Saturday at a conference in Ho Chi Minh City, which was attended by university representatives, businesses, job market forecasters, and students.

Many foreign businesses have shown disappointment at the communication skills and teamwork spirit of local fresh college graduates, according to Masaki Yamashita, chairman of the Japan Business Association in Vietnam.

Those newcomers often do not know how to communicate with their line managers, Yamashita said, adding that they are well equipped with academic knowledge but usually fail to apply it to real situations.

The Japanese chairman said that his young Vietnamese employees were once unable to discuss a problem in English so he had to let them work on it in Vietnamese.

But the staff still failed to solve the problem because many of them just tried to protect themselves rather than think of the solution.

“They did nothing to settle it in the end,” Yamashita said.

Tran Thanh Liem, with the Ho Chi Minh City branch of state-owned power company Vietnam Electricity, said that university graduates now lack presentation and English speaking skills.

“They can read materials written in English,” Liem said, “but they cannot speak the language so it is very hard for us to send them to international conferences or for overseas training.”

He added that they cannot work in groups even though they perform excellently on individual assignments.

“They are also bad at researching, writing essays, and identifying corporate problems,” Liem said.

Dr. Le Thi Thanh Mai, student affairs chief at the Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM), said that businesses can use, without any re-training, slightly over half of the school’s annual number of graduates while 86.9 percent can land a job within one year of graduation. Corporate opinions will help higher learning institutions tailor their graduation requirements to current job market demands, Dr. Nguyen Duc Nghia, VNU-HCM vice director, said, noting that tertiary schools however will be unable to meet all the needs of businesses.

Universities can only provide students with basic knowledge and skills that can best help them adapt to a working environment, Dr. Nghia said.

“For instance, we can merely train students so that they are able to smoothly utilize a new machine in one month,” he concluded.