'Soft skills' for mountain youth

“Soft skills” for young people in the mountainous areas are simply the ability to behave, approach, and talk with people outside the community. Why do we say this? Because for a long time, people in the mountainous areas, especially ethnic minority communities, often seem to have inferiority complexes, lack of confidence, and fear in communicating and behaving with people in the lowlands, especially communities living in urban areas.

Illustration: MH

The lack of confidence in communication and behavior of ethnic minorities has invisibly created a gap between them and many opportunities in finding jobs, cultural exchange, trade, services, etc. However, the cause also originates from both sides: from the people in the mountains and the people in the lowland communities.

For ethnic minorities: Differences in geography, language, culture, thinking about life and lack of education and awareness have created inferiority complex and lack of confidence when facing and interacting with people from the lowlands.

For lowland people: In behavioral culture, there is still discrimination against ethnic minorities. That discrimination often occurs even with traditional identity factors of the people. Sometimes people call the mountain youth with very bad language such as: "Ethnic children". This makes the mountain people do not want or find it very difficult to integrate in communication and interaction activities. The obvious consequences of this conflict are not difficult to see. That is, there are few ethnic minority workers participating in factories and workshops with advanced and modern production lines. If mountain youth and workers participate in the labor market outside the province, they mainly do manual labor, low intellectual content.

Mountainous workers in Nghe An learn about labor export. Photo: Thu Huong

That raises the issue of guiding “soft skills” for the people in the mountainous areas, especially for the youth and the younger generation. First of all, it is necessary to teach thoroughly about common languages; in addition to teaching academic knowledge, it is also necessary to equip social knowledge right from preschool level; through many forms of disseminating legal knowledge to the subjects in the community. Continue to impart, preserve and develop good traditional cultural values ​​of the locality, at the same time guide on behavior and communication when going out into the community.