Project “Triple Win Nurses – Recruitment of Trainees from Viet Nam” marks three-year anniversary

On 29.7.2022, the project “Triple Win Nurses – Recruitment of Trainees from Viet Nam” celebrated the language school graduation of soon to be nursing trainees of its third year.

The project “Triple Win Nurses – Recruitment of Trainees from Viet Nam” is a cooperation among the International Placement Services (ZAV) of the German Federal Employment Agency, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH to prepare and place nursing trainees in hospitals and nursing homes in Germany. Starting in Viet Nam in mid-2019, the project had been initially scheduled to run until 2023 but was extended until 2025.

In just a few weeks, a new cohort of Triple Win program participants will travel to Germany to start their three-year nursing training. Simultaneously, the project also celebrates the start of the language course of its new cohort with 150 program participants in Viet Nam who are expected to begin their training in Germany in the fall of 2023. This celebration marks an important first step in a young person’s journey to becoming a nurse in Germany: learning German.

Many young Vietnamese people decide to take the step to Germany with the desire to realize educational and work goals as well as build up a long-term plan in Germany. The European country is known and loved as a place to live and work and has long been a popular option for many young people after graduation.

In the Triple Win program, young people from all over Viet Nam come to the capital Hanoi to prepare themselves linguistically for the nursing training. Here they learn German for one year at two reputable language institutes commissioned by GIZ before their three-year vocational training in Germany. The institutes also provide accommodation for program participants in Hanoi.

The biggest challenge for the participants is learning the German language. A B1 language certificate (according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) is enough for obtaining the visa. However, life and the nursing training in Germany require a higher level of German language skills to be able to understand and actively communicate even more complex topics. Therefore, when participating in the project, the trainees will learn German to the end of B2 level (which is higher than B1 level) and get familiar with situations or basic nursing terminologies in German right from Viet Nam. There are also further challenges beside language to consider, such as cultural differences. This affects not only the Vietnamese trainees but also participating hospitals and nursing homes, who need to consider the differences as a challenge to overcome. To address the challenge, GIZ not only prepares the trainees for cultural integration, but also advises the training providers on Viet Nam-related topics.

After three years, Triple Win Viet Nam has gained a lot of experience. Learning German is and will remain the main topic. The global pandemic has also made language acquisition and arrival in Germany more difficult.

But it has been shown that perseverance is worthwhile. The first cohort started their nursing training in 2020 at hospitals and nursing homes in Germany and will begin the final training year in the fall of 2022.

In Viet Nam, too, the program has proved to be valuable. The priority remains to open the way to young people in Viet Nam without a placement fee. Participants in Viet Nam only pay a monthly fee of 34 euros for the language course in the preparatory year in Hanoi.

Also in the future, there will be a chance to enroll in Triple Win Viet Nam: Another round is planned for 2023.

Contact:

• Nguyen Quynh Hoa, GIZ Project Officer, Email: hoa.nguyenquynh@giz.de

• Tran Khanh Duy, DOLAB Officer, Email: duytk@molisa.gov.vn, Phone: 024 3824 9517 # 508