In the recent decade, Vietnam’s shifting focus from the socialist vision of educational equity to a culture of self-directed lifelong learning seems to be a pragmatic necessity to upskill the workforce for economic competitiveness in the global arena. Yet it also signals what researchers have identified as the state’s mobilization project, where responsibilities for social opportunities and well-being are shifted onto individuals through their will to learn and improve. Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality as a tool of critique, this article explores the way in which intellectual middle-class identity as lifelong learner is produced and negotiated at the workplace. Drawing on two ethnographic case studies, participant observation, interviews and documents analysis, I argue that covert forms of exploitation rely on technologies of the self, where discourse of development through lifelong learning entices workers to see labor as a project of self-transformation and thus become willing to sacrifice their rights and benefits for a chance of class mobility. Furthermore, despite the glorification of workplace learning as tools for reducing social exclusion, this seduction though empowerment acts to naturalize middle-class privilege and subsume structural inequality, while in actuality access to knowledge and social capital continues to depend on existing position in social, cultural and economic structure. Finally, my findings call for the need to situate discourse of lifelong learning as unfold in a socialist country now deeply implicated in global systems of labor and production, where learning is increasingly defined and driven by market profit.