The theme of this year’s International Human Resources Day on May 20th is “shaping the new future”. It is a topic, which highlights how working in HR is about so much more than hiring employees and managing their benefits.
It is about ensuring that every staff member has a clear career path and the opportunity to continue building new skills and then utilizing them. At THP, we work hard to embrace benefits in the widest sense of the word: it is as much about training as it is about earning a good salary.
This has always been one of the biggest draws for new recruits to the company. We frequently highlight training opportunities in our recruitment campaigns, particularly for the up-and-coming Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012.
By 2025, Generation Z is expected to account for about one quarter of Vietnam’s workforce so it is important to understand what drives them. What we have found is that this is a generation who are not only digital natives, but also value creativity and learning.
We featured this in a recent recruitment campaign, profiling a group of bright, young staff members who had just joined. One of them is now working in our HR department. This employee shares that one of the main reasons why she likes working at THP is because she can be creative and has plenty of opportunities to continue acquiring new skills.
Training is one of the key themes in Competing with Giants. My father is so keen on the subject that he is always saying that he wants to teach business management, if and when he retires.
He also doesn’t mind if people undertake THP’s training programs and then leave. He knows that this will help to benefit society at large.
I think that one of THP’s key differentiators is how we define training. Yes, it is partly about teaching the mechanics of how to undertake different job functions. But the thread, which runs through all our training programs, is the core values that we are instilling at the same time.
In essence, we are teaching people how to be good team members: the art of contributing ideas and contrary opinions without causing someone to lose face.
We train our senior managers in people skills: how to listen, how to involve every single team member and what tone of voice to use. And perhaps most importantly of all, we teach everyone to lead by example.
The sixth of our seven core values captures all of this: Today is Better then Yesterday But Not as Good as Tomorrow. One part stresses the benefits of learning from failure as well as success. The other emphasizes the importance of understanding and encouraging a spirit of learning, sharing and innovative thinking.
Many Asian educational systems are unfortunately based on rote learning. Yet at THP, we know that we will only continue to be successful if we foster an innovative working culture.
So shaping the new future for THP will be a continuation of what we are already doing: promoting a culture of lifelong learning.
