Vietnam Work Permit Requirements: How Many Years of Experience After University? Can Fresh Graduates Work in Vietnam?

[Vietnam Work Permit Requirements: How Many Years of Experience After University? Can Fresh Graduates Work in Vietnam?]

Start with the answer: on the most common "expert" route, the current general bar is a bachelor's degree or higher plus at least two years of relevant, documentable work experience. For designated priority sectors, it is a related degree plus one year of relevant experience. Those two years mean relevant work experience, not simply being two years past graduation.

Now the premise many people miss: under Vietnamese law, a foreigner working in the country is the exception, not the default. Article 152 of the 2019 Labour Code is blunt about it. Employers may hire foreigners only for positions that Vietnamese workers cannot yet fill, and only in four categories: managers (the people who legally run a company), executive directors (heads of branches or representative offices, or people running a specific function), experts, and technical workers. Article 151 adds the baseline conditions: at least 18 years old, with professional skills or work experience, in good health, no criminal record or pending prosecution, and a work permit issued by a Vietnamese authority (with a list of legal exemptions, which this article will call "permit-exempt" cases). You have to fit one of the four categories before an employer can even file for you.

The rules sit in three layers. The Labour Code sets the principles; a government decree fills in the details, roughly the equivalent of implementing regulations; and a separate decree sets the penalties. The details on the four categories are in Decree 219/2025/NĐ-CP, which took effect on 7 August 2025 and replaced the two previous decrees (152/2020 and 70/2023). This article calls it "the new rules."

Of the four categories, the one most Taiwanese office workers will land in is "expert." Article 3 of the new rules defines it as a bachelor's degree or higher (or "equivalent," a word the decree does not define further) plus at least two years of work experience relevant to the position. If the job is in finance, science, technology, innovation, national digital transformation, or a priority sector designated by a ministry or provincial People's Committee, the bar drops another notch: a bachelor's or higher in a related field plus one year of relevant experience. Under the old rules, a general expert needed three years; the new rules cut that to two, and the priority-sector fast track is new. The paperwork is straightforward: your degree, plus a letter from your previous employer confirming your years of experience. If you have worked in Vietnam before, a previous work permit can stand in for the experience letter.

The other three categories test different things. "Manager" is not about degrees or years at all; it turns on the company charter or an appointment document, showing you are a manager as defined by the Law on Enterprises, or the head or deputy head of an agency or organisation. "Executive director" has two routes: the head of a branch, representative office or business location; or someone who directly runs a function of the enterprise and has at least three years of relevant experience. That three-year requirement is new under Decree 219 and stricter than before. "Technical worker" is the route for people without a university degree: at least one year of training plus two years of relevant experience, or three years of relevant experience outright. The old rules required five years on the experience-only route.

Map that onto three common profiles. A university graduate with two or more years of relevant experience meets the expert test. Someone without a degree but with three or more years on a production line or a construction site can go the technical-worker route. If you have no relevant work experience, no formal appointment as a manager or executive director, no student-intern status and no other exemption, a fresh graduate without full-time experience will usually not qualify for an ordinary expert or technical-worker route: experts need two years (one even in priority sectors), and technical workers need a year of training plus two years.

Article 7 of the new rules does carve out an exemption for "students and trainees currently enrolled," provided they hold an internship agreement or a job offer from an employer in Vietnam. But that status is a student's, and the arrangement is an internship, not post-graduation employment. There is one other path that ignores years of experience, Article 7 clause 15: people working in priority sectors who have been confirmed by a ministry or a provincial People's Committee are exempt. That depends on obtaining the authority's confirmation, though; it is not a personal qualification. Public case reports also warn that local practice and a company's internal resources may differ, so ask outright at the interview whether the company will handle the work permit. Your qualifications set the threshold; how well HR knows the process decides how long you wait and how many times you resubmit.

Beyond the permit itself, there is a set of cases where no permit is needed. Article 7 of the new rules lists 15 of them. Exempt does not mean unregulated. In most exempt cases the employer still applies for a "certificate of exemption," which the authority issues within five working days. Only a few categories skip the certificate, such as stays under 90 days, capital contributors above VND 3 billion, and spouses of Vietnamese citizens, and even then the employer must notify the authority at least three working days before work starts.

Four of the 15 matter most to a typical Taiwanese reader. First, working in Vietnam for fewer than 90 days in a calendar year, counted from 1 January. This is the usual route for short business trips and technical support. But the clause applies specifically to managers, executive directors, experts and technical workers, so you still need to fit one of the four categories; it is not a workaround for someone with zero experience. Second, intra-company transfers. The law looks for a commercial presence of the foreign company sending you, not a factory in Vietnam as such. The listed forms include a foreign-invested enterprise, a representative office or a branch of a foreign trader. In practice, a factory operated under a foreign-invested enterprise may be the operating site of that commercial presence, but the factory itself does not automatically create an exemption.

To use an intra-company transfer as a work-permit exemption, the Vietnamese operation must also fall within the 11 service sectors covered by Vietnam's WTO commitments, and you must have been continuously employed by the sending company for at least 12 months. A factory is not, by itself, a separate qualification under those 11 service sectors; if the Vietnamese operation is pure manufacturing, the factory's existence alone cannot establish this exemption, and a work permit will usually still be needed. On the other hand, "intra-company transfer" can also be listed as the form of employment on a work-permit application; it does not automatically mean exemption. The application still has to fit one of the four legal categories and meet the relevant documentary requirements. Third, owners or capital-contributing members of a limited liability company, or the chair or board members of a joint-stock company, with a capital contribution of VND 3 billion or more. Fourth, the priority-sector confirmation route in clause 15, described above.

Separately, the 2019 Labour Code, in Article 154, has long exempted foreigners married to Vietnamese citizens and living in Vietnam.

The biggest change in the new rules is procedural. The old process had three steps: post a recruitment notice, apply for approval of the "need to use foreign labour," and only then apply for the permit. The whole thing could take five weeks or more. The new rules fold the needs approval into the permit application, so it is a single filing. The recruitment notice survives only for three situations, working under a labour contract, executing a bid package, and working for foreign missions or organisations in Vietnam, and it can now be posted on any public or company platform at least five days before filing rather than on the official portal. Ordinary employment is "working under a labour contract," so for most hires the employer still posts the five-day notice, then files no earlier than 60 days and no later than 10 days before the planned start date. The authority issues the permit within 10 working days of receiving a complete dossier; a refusal must be explained in writing within three working days. The statutory review window went from five days to 10, but with two steps removed the total is shorter. The overall end-to-end timeline is estimated at roughly three weeks. A permit runs for the term of the labour contract, secondment letter or business licence, up to a maximum of two years. For those hired under a labour contract, employer and employee must sign a written contract after the permit is issued and before work begins.

Article 18 lists the dossier: the employer's needs statement and application form, a health certificate, a valid passport, a criminal record certificate issued within the past six months (the police clearance, in Taiwanese terms), two 4×6 cm photos on a white background, a document proving the form of employment (a secondment letter for intra-company transfers, for example), and the degree and experience letters described above. Under Article 5, any of these issued abroad must in principle be consular-legalised, then translated into Vietnamese and notarised. The health certificate has a detail people often miss: it must in principle come from a qualified Vietnamese medical facility. A foreign certificate is accepted only where the two countries have a mutual recognition arrangement, and only if it is less than 12 months old.

Working without a permit is covered by Article 32 of Decree 12/2022. The worker is fined VND 15 million to 25 million, with deportation as an additional penalty; Article 153 of the 2019 Labour Code says the same. Employers are fined on a sliding scale by headcount, from VND 30 million to 75 million, and the amounts double when the employer is a company or organisation. One thing to watch: in July the government issued Decree 283/2026, which replaces Decree 12/2022 from 10 September. The foreign-worker provisions move to Article 13, and the fine bands for working without a permit are unchanged.

Finally, the question many people ask: will the bar drop further? The direction is downward, but nothing is final. In late May the Ministry of Home Affairs published a draft amendment to Decree 219 for public comment through early June, to be submitted to the government afterwards; as of now it has not been issued. The draft explanation says the current "expert" test relies on fixed degree and experience criteria, making it harder to capture talent in AI, semiconductors, quantum computing, culture and education. The draft would therefore scrap the experience requirement for experts in certain technology and innovation fields. Other proposals target paperwork: accepting health certificates from qualified foreign medical facilities, so applicants can complete their files before arriving; dropping consular legalisation and notarisation of passports; and no longer requiring resubmission of photos, passports, criminal records and other documents already held in shared government databases.

The experience bar for experts has gone from three years under the old rules to two (one in priority sectors) since August 2025, and the draft would take it to zero for certain high-tech fields. Through all of that, the requirement for a university degree has not moved, and executive directors picked up a new three-year requirement. For anyone thinking about working in Vietnam, the practical order is to check first which category your degree and experience put you in, and only then worry about whether a company wants you. Under the current rules, if you fit no category, an eager employer will find it very hard to get around that.

This article summarises publicly available regulations and official reporting and is not legal advice. Provincial practice and the status of the amendment may change; before applying, confirm the latest position with your employer, the local authority or a lawyer.