How young people in Viet Nam are building pathways to decent work

HA NOI (ILO News) - Decent work means quality employment that guarantees safety, dignity, fairness, and a voice in the workplace. For young people, it also means access to training, skills development, and a safe and smooth transition from school to the labour market. Ensuring decent work for youth is not only a matter of rights, it is a driver of sustainable economic growth and the foundation for building a fair society.

For many young Vietnamese, the path to decent work remains long and full of obstacles. The unemployment rate among youth aged 15 to 24 stands at around 9.0% – nearly four times the national average. Many young people work in the informal economy, facing precarious working conditions, limited career prospects, and restricted access to social protection. This situation reflects deep-rooted challenges: skills gaps, a lack of quality career guidance, limited access to labour market information, and persistent regional disparities and inequalities in opportunity.

No one understands this more deeply than Nguyễn Hữu Quân, who was born and raised in Hà Giang – a province where his childhood was shaped by limestone mountains, terraced rice fields, and villages still lacking in many things. Throughout twelve years of school, Quân never harboured a clear dream or direction about university, or anything beyond the familiar boundaries of his birthplace. But at eighteen, a simple question changed everything: “If I don’t take one more step, will I regret it someday?” Quân submitted a single application to one university, with no backup plan, and no particular direction in mind.

© ILO

© ILO

Questions of direction and career opportunity also weighed heavily on Tạ Khánh Linh – a Hanoi graduate with a bachelor’s degree in international business. Her challenge was not a lack of access to education; it was how to find a path aligned with her passion and abilities, while narrowing the gap between what school had equipped her with and what the labour market actually demanded. For a stretch of time, her job applications were rejected one after another. The pressure mounted week by week, and the question “Am I good enough?” began to erode the confidence of someone who had always taken quiet pride in her academic abilities.

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© ILO

For both Khánh Linh and Tú Anh – a communications officer at a Hanoi university and one of the founding members of the Viet Nam Youth Network for Decent Work and Green Jobs' Facebook's page – this is precisely the role that the ILO's Youth Network is fulfilling: not a scholarship programme or a job-placement service, but a space where young people can connect, keep learning, keep trying, and keep believing in themselves even when the market has yet to believe in them first.

Tú Anh describes her career journey as “trial and error,” and says so without a hint of embarrassment – because to her, what matters is not where success came from, but the effort she earned entirely on her own. What she has learned most from the Network has come from the people she met there. She describes each member as though painting a group portrait: the one who is always thinking about how to help others show their best; the one who is gentle but meticulous down to the smallest detail; the one who is quick and versatile; the one so enthusiastic that she’ll “jump to any tune.” Each person, in Tú Anh’s eyes, is a lesson, not from a textbook, but a lesson in how to live true to one’s own values. That is also what she hopes to bring to the students in the career orientation programme she is nurturing, alongside projects focused on mental health, because, she believes, a young person can only truly thrive when they are grounded from within.

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© ILO

While Tú Anh found her strength through the members she worked alongside in the Network, Khánh Linh regained her confidence through the opportunities and skills she gradually “unlocked.” “The first time I was invited to speak at an ILO research seminar as a youth representative, and to have seasoned experts actually listen and engage with me, I was genuinely moved. I realised that young people are fully capable of contributing, and that our voices can be reflected in the programmes and solutions designed for us,” Linh shared. From that moment, Linh became more confident and proactive in the Network’s research and communications work. That growing sense of agency helped her land a job well suited to her – coordinating talent engagement activities and providing career guidance for students at a well-known university. She and her co-founders also launched COFY, a youth career guidance platform, and returned to her own former school to run a career orientation session for current students – a place where she herself had once been one of those young people who were “capable, but didn’t know what they were capable of or what they wanted,” and who “needed someone to help them recognise their own potential.”

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© ILO

Quân, meanwhile, chose a different path: to go back and open doors for those who had not had the chance to walk through them as he had. After four years of university, he founded Ước Mơ Vùng Biên (Border Dreams) – a youth-led community organisation with a simple but far-reaching mission: to ensure that any young person, no matter where they were born, has a little more reason to believe in themselves. When he joined the Viet Nam Youth Network for Decent Work and Green Jobs, Quân encountered the concept of decent work for the first time and realised that what he was doing in the border regions needed to be placed within a wider vision: not just creating jobs, but creating jobs that are dignified, safe, fair, and full of possibility, not just a "profession", but a life with purpose.

In January 2026, Ước Mơ Vùng Biên organised a forum titled “Green Jobs & Opportunities for Youth” at Dai Nam University, drawing over 117 in-person participants and reaching nearly 50,000 people online. For Quân, what moved him more than any figure was the moment he heard a young person from the border region speak for the first time about “sustainable careers” and labour rights – concepts that had once seemed to belong to someone else’s world entirely.

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© ILO

The ILO believes that young people are not merely beneficiaries of employment policies, but active agents in shaping their own labour markets. Quân, Linh, and Tú Anh – each in their own way – are bringing that belief to life: they learn, they connect, they create opportunities, and they inspire other young people to do the same. Through the Viet Nam Youth Network for Decent Work and Green Jobs, the ILO-Korea Partnership Programme is committed to creating spaces like these – spaces where young people are heard, equipped, and trusted to foster the change Viet Nam needs: toward an economy that is greener, more inclusive, and leaves no one behind.