Tips for building a career back home

VIETNAM-AUSTRALIA

What does it mean to ‘come home’ after studying overseas? For many Vietnamese graduates pursuing their education in Australia, the return journey is both exciting and unsettling. An Australian degree may carry pride and promise, but career opportunities at home often demand more than academic credentials.

With limited policy support, labour market mismatches and the undervaluing of international qualifications, Vietnamese returnees need to rely on adaptability, professional networks and resilience to build sustainable and meaningful careers.

In recent years, Australia has become one of the most popular destinations for Vietnamese students, with nearly 50,000 enrolled in 2025, meaning they rank fourth among all international student cohorts in the country. This trend has resulted in a growing number of graduates returning to Vietnam with advanced expertise.

However, their employability is shaped by both broad systems and immediate social contexts. Government initiatives to welcome returnees back remain limited. Meanwhile, the domestic labour market often favours degrees from countries such as the United States or Japan, which places Australian graduates at a disadvantage in certain sectors.

Concurrently, many returnees face a mismatch between their career aspirations and their actual employment, often due to family expectations. Gaps between university learning and workplace demands further complicate the transition.

These difficulties highlight the need to investigate how Vietnamese returnees could strategically mobilise their resources to build sustainable career pathways in their home country.

Social and agentic capital

Among the factors shaping employability, social capital and agentic capital stand out as particularly significant for Vietnamese returnees and their sustainable employment.

Social capital represents the networks of relationships and connections, ranging from family and friends to alumni groups and professional associations, that graduates can draw on when re-entering the workforce. While ties with family and friends provide emotional support and initial guidance, they may also narrow choices for returnees when career expectations are shaped around stability or social prestige.

By contrast, professional connections, forged through alumni networks, workplace mentors or industry associations, can be more beneficial. These relationships offer the returnees access to valuable insights into the local labour market, occupation prospects and long-term growth, which are crucial for their career advancement.

However, opportunities to cultivate such networks are often scarce in Vietnam, where mentoring cultures and structured networking systems remain underdeveloped. Consequently, building and sustaining professional connections require deliberate effort and long-term trust. This fact underscores the critical role of individual agency.

Agentic capital refers to the ability to strategically integrate and mobilise multiple capitals, from human, social and cultural to psychological capital, and identities that allow individuals to pursue their career trajectories aligned with market realities.

It enables graduates to transform existing resources into new opportunities, for example, converting international experience into valuable local insights, or leveraging academic expertise to build professional credibility. Agentic capital is also expressed through adaptability, critical reflection and goal-oriented action.

Additionally, agentic capital could enable returnees to compensate for systemic gaps, such as limited mentoring cultures or undervalued Australian qualifications, by cultivating peer networks, engaging in informal mentoring and exploring alternative professional pathways. Consequently, this capital does more than support short-term employment: it fosters resilience, facilitates growth and promotes long-term career sustainability in an unpredictable labour market.

Practical strategies

Several practical strategies may help Vietnamese graduates returning from Australia to strengthen their employability in the local market.

Engaging in self-reflection on their strengths, limitations and career goals could allow them to recognise where international training aligns with, or diverges from, workplace expectations in Vietnam. Such critical reflection would lay the foundations for adaptability and more realistic career planning.

Additionally, capital conversion might also be a valuable approach. Skills and experiences gained abroad could be reframed to address local needs. For instance, education graduates could consider transforming classroom innovations into teacher training workshops or utilising intercultural competence to improve curriculum design. This approach not only demonstrates relevance but also builds professional credibility in contexts where Australian qualifications may be undervalued.

Furthermore, among all the social capital components, professional networks should be nourished to enhance the employability of Vietnamese returnees. Beyond family connections, returnees could benefit from joining alumni associations, educational forums and industry groups. Establishing mentoring relationships, even informally, may provide returnees with guidance and access to opportunities that are often not available through formal channels.

Similarly, sustaining peer support would make a tangible difference to employability outcomes. Insight-sharing sessions among returnees would be beneficial for them to foster resilience and collective problem-solving.

Purposeful career journeys

Ultimately, sustainable employability depends less on credentials alone than on how returnees strategically and critically mobilise their resources within Vietnam’s evolving labour market.

Returning home with an overseas degree can be both rewarding and worrying, but it could also mark the beginning of a more purposeful career journey.

Through using different forms of agency, trust-based networks and adaptability, Vietnamese returnees can shape their future careers to be resilient, meaningful and responsive to the needs of their communities.

Phuong Tran is a master of education candidate at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include social and emotional learning, early childhood and inclusive education, and the sustainable employability of teachers, particularly in special education. She has designed educational programmes across different levels and contributed to professional development initiatives for teachers in diverse disciplines.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.