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Region/Country: Vietnam

ELEVATE Vietnam

The construction boom in Vietnam, especially in the urban areas, is providing more business opportunities for the elevator/escalator (mobility) industry. For a fast developing country like Vietnam, raising the awareness of workplace safety & workplace productivity (efficiency) can be considered as a crucial part for sustainable growth and align local workforce standard to that of the developed world.

 

ASSIST, in partnership with Schindler Vietnam has collaborated on a project called ELEVATE Vietnam whose objective is to raise awareness and transfer knowledge on safe and energy efficient use and deployment of elevators and escalators to minimize health risks that result from malfunction and incorrect use. Activities related to the project consist of collection, assessment and evaluation of current training program, subsequent actions to improve the training curricula, creation of training materials with support from Schindler experts and parallel translation, the identification of representatives for each target group of the  project (public users, suppliers, customers, relevant ministry/departments/agencies, government officials, universities and students) and conduction of training on safety and energy efficiency.

 

The project aims to achieve these lasting impacts:  improvements in the training of technical workforce will bring benefits in terms of higher employment rate, fewer accidents, and an enabled private sector. The trainers will be better capacitated and connected to provide relevant and targeted training. Moreover, the project is expected to benefit the wider society as end-users of elevators and escalators, which would now be safer to use and continuously maintained for lesser disruptions. With 50% of the work done, it aims to deliver before the end of 2018, the successful establishment of training courses and execution of the awareness campaign and training on the safe and efficient use of elevators and escalators.

PROMPT – Promote Technical Education Reform of Mechanics to Professional Technicians

Vietnam has approximately 53 million workers, 83.5 percent of which are manual laborers without any vocational certificates (especially, in the elevator services industry). A report by World Bank shows that Vietnam currently ranks on the bottom half of the rankings on ASEAN labor force development.

 

ASSIST, together with KONE Vietnam LLC, developed a project called PROMPT to improve and promote technical training in Vietnam through a dual education model and advance safety and quality of testing and maintaining elevator service. It aims at motivating students and existing workforce to think and focus on the quality of their labor, in a sense, becoming technicians instead of just manual workforce as mechanics. The goal of the project is to enhance the skills and attitudes of technical workers, attempting a shift towards taking pride in quality or work and skills improvement.

 

The project team has commenced working on the development of the training curricula based on the existing agenda and improved it according to a collected feedback from potential employers of the students in the private sector. A complete needs and requirements assessment will be conducted to evaluate the biggest gaps in education and enhance the employability of the graduates. For sustainability, the partner training academy will be capacitated to run the improved training program by training their trainers. The same course will be targeting trainers from other technical schools as well and include senior experts in the field,  who can continue with in-company advance training programs. Currently, a training program for electricians with sessions within the private sector is being implemented. Additionally, the KONE Training Center at the College has commenced development.

Green Electrician – Education in Electricity for Employment

Vietnam’s fast economic growth due to “Doi Moi” – the 1986 economic reform,  has led to the increased demand for skilled labor with the government responding through the formulation of a “Vocational Training Development Strategy 2011 – 2020”.  The rapid industrialization over the past decade has also resulted in increased annual energy consumption growth rate of more than 12%. Forecasts show that an energy shortage of up to 70% could be experienced by 2025.

 

Seeing the need to increase energy management skills and trained labor in the industry to ensure environmentally sustainable development, Schneider Electric and ASSIST spearheaded a private sector partnership (PSP) project called “Green Electrician: Education in Electricity for Employment”. The project aims to promote and improve vocational training education in the growing energy industry through the establishment of training programs in cooperation with a local education partner. Specifically the project targeted students from underprivileged backgrounds via a free basic training program in order to help students gain access to stable employment opportunities. It aims to establish training centers or laboratories, develop practice-oriented training curricula, establish training programs on Basic Electricity and Sustainable Energy Management and provide entrepreneurship training to young people to help them create their own businesses and ensure sustainable income generation. The project is also promoting vocational training opportunities in schools to increase awareness and interest through job fairs featuring electric companies.

 

The project was able to build two laboratories in Ly Tu Trong Technical College (LTTC) which instilled hands-on experience and trained fifteen local teachers who in turn, trained and disseminated knowledge to other training centers, produced three training programs and trained 1,400 students. The program is scheduled to conclude by the end of 2018 and project implementers seek to secure nationwide adaptation of the training programs in the long run.

Fire and Life Safety Risk Profiling

The standards of work health and safety were brought to the forefront of the public eye after the collapse of the Rana Plaza Building in Bangladesh in April 2013. The commercial structure housed a garment factory and its collapse resulted in numerous injuries and a death toll of 1,127. In the aftermath, it called for improved working conditions and better compliance with factory safety standards.

 

The IFC Fire and Life Safety Risk Profiling (FLSRP) Project aimed to support the Better Work Programme – a partnership project of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – in its objective to improve labour conditions and compliance of standards by participating garment and footwear factories in developing countries. The project aided Better Work in reviewing its tools and approaches to assess and remedy fire and building safety issues in each of the countries in which it operates; ultimately to prevent or mitigate the impact of future incidents like the 2013 disaster in Bangladesh.

 

FLSRP involved the conduct of sectoral-level risk assessments on fire and building safety in garment and footwear factories to develop respective risk profiles for Cambodia, Haiti, Indonesia, Jordan, Lesotho, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. Major activities included research and desk review, benchmarking, report review, site selection and inspections, stakeholder discussions, data compilation and lessons-learnt workshops in each of the target countries.