Vietnam's hot job market

Despite the threat posed to its export model by the Trump administration's tariffs, Vietnam continues to be one of the ASEAN region's most robust economies. This is reflected in the nation's job market, which is outperforming Southeast Asian peers.

Manufacturing has been the economy's core pillar for years, but tech has emerged has an important employer as well. As a "connector economy," Vietnam has been a hub for western apparel companies like Nike and Lululemon since Donald Trump's first term; more recently, Vietnam signed a deal with Apple to expand production of smart-home devices.

Our first chart taps weekly data on active job postings from Revelio Labs to compare Vietnam with the rest of the ASEAN-6 over the past 12 months. Vietnam moved into positive year-on-year growth territory in May, despite the impact of "Liberation Day" just weeks earlier. Since then, only Singapore's job-vacancy growth has been comparable.

As our second chart shows, Vietnam's wage growth has outperformed regional peers for six straight quarters -- surpassing a 7% pace since the first quarter of 2024.

Drilling down into sectors that are expanding their workforce in Vietnam show how manufacturing and IT stand out. Revelio's alternative datasets show that these two industries are jointly responsible for most of Vietnam's job-vacancy growth since August. Job postings for the economy as a whole have shown a remarkable turnaround from the broad weakness of early 2025.

We conclude with a trio of charts on productivity, which are based on our proprietary calculations to standardize this measure across the ASEAN countries.

While productivity growth in Vietnam is the fastest in ASEAN, it still trails Thailand and (especially) Malaysia in absolute labor productivity levels. That reflects Vietnam's ongoing transition from low-cost production to higher-value, skill-intensive manufacturing.

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