IT professionals accept pay cuts in difficult job market

"Usually when IT professionals like us quit a job, we receive a lot of offers, but there were none this time," Hanoi developer Phan Huy Anh tells VnExpress.

"More accurately, there were none for the kind of work I wanted or the salary I expected."

After almost half a year of being unemployed, he decided to lower his salary expectations and landed a new job.

"My expectation was above VND25 million (US$981.7) after taxes, the same as what I got at my last company, but I accepted my current job at VND20 million," Anh says. "The work is a bit different from what I had before. I felt immense pressure to keep salaries down at all the companies I interviewed."

Though lower pay, he is unwilling to switch jobs now, keenly aware of his joblessness last year.

"Had I not taken this job, I might not be working now," he says. "I tell myself these are rough times, and they might not pass anytime soon, and so I keep working."

According to the 2024-2025 IT Salary & Job Market Report by tech jobs listing site ITviec, in 2025 only 60 % of companies are planning to expand their IT workforce. It had been 73% in 2024.

Some 38.7% of IT companies do not plan to increase, or even seek to downsize, their payrolls in the first half of 2025, the highest rate since 2020.

ITviec lists the reasons for these decisions as a lack of new projects, a preference to use AI for efficiency improvement instead of hiring and cost optimization imperatives.

This is impacting expectations among IT professionals. In their bid to secure jobs, nearly 74% of candidates have lowered their expectations, with 42.9% willing to accept lower salaries, 27.6 percentage points lower than in 2024.

Nguyen Hong Nhung, who works at an IT recruitment firm, says many candidates with years of experience are applying for positions with lower requirements and pay.

"That means junior candidates are now facing stiffer competition as senior candidates are accepting pay cuts to get these jobs."

For a position that requires no experience, she had to reject overqualified candidates having years of experience as developers and excellent English proficiency.

"Those candidates tell me they have found switching jobs difficult because the language they specialized in has gone out of favor.

"It is hard to proceed with those cases; what if they then find another job at the same level as their last one? Sometimes there is no satisfactory solution."

Meanwhile, those already employed are increasingly hesitant to switch. "They might be interested in a new job, but when it comes to making the decision to switch, they are actually hesitant to move to a new company, or they already feel settled at their current employer," Nhung adds.

According to Nguyen Ngoc Duc, a senior expert at financial crime prevention firm Trapets Vietnam with more than 10 years’ experience in IT, the tech job market has improved in post-pandemic years.

But this growth remains unstable, and companies are entering a phase of restructuring their workforce and optimizing costs, he says. "You prioritize different things at different times."

When IT development in Vietnam started with outsourcing companies, employees just needed to be agile and quick learners, and when startups started taking over, they needed deeper technical know-how, he says.

"Now that money is tighter, companies are focusing more on culture and processes."

And as AI continues to develop, it is also making the IT job market less predictable. "My work has not been affected yet, but only for now," Duc says.

"In a few more years that is inevitably going to change. What is in place right now is not revolutionary yet, but it is only a matter of time. You cannot foresee if one day something truly effective might come out." He says that keeping up to date with new tech and learning new skills, especially language and AI skills, are prerequisites for adapting to today’s volatile job market.

Nhung says opportunities remain for IT professionals albeit with higher requirements.

Her clients are mainly outsourcing companies, who mostly serve the European and American markets.

There are other vacancies in Japanese companies for bridge engineers or IT communicators, communicative but technical roles that aid work between offshore development teams and their clients, which get few job candidates, she says.

"To get a significant bump in salary, you have to be able to use English conversationally as you will be working with Americans, for example."

A Java engineer with five years of experience who can speak English could earn VND65-70 million per month, more than someone with equivalent experience but without English skills, she adds.