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."