International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences "IATSS FORUM" Leadership Training Program in Japan For Young Professionals in ASEAN countries

Hello everyone,
I am Thuan from Vietnam and I am longing to join IATSS (56th participants) in Japan.
Everyone does have a dream for their future career. For me, my dream future career is about success, which is balanced (and self-consolidated) between three domains: Passion, Community Contribution and Personal Achievement. I strive to develop in a job that comes from my passion, where I can grow my personal career in close line with contributing to community (for example, students and SMEs), thus, achieve my personal integrity and value of a business professional, a leader who can make society better.
During the past fifteen years, I have continuously spared my effort on this track. Thanks to my hard work and study, I have had professional training from good university (Master of Marketing from renowned Melbourne University in Australia) through a rigorous scholarship (100% Australian Development Scholarship from Australian government). I have grown myself in several professional multinational work environments (Toyota, Colgate-Palmolive, and Piaggio) in progressively higher roles with long work assignments across the globe (Italy, Singapore and Vietnam). I am still striving to leap forward on this 3-domain career track in the years to come.
In line with my dream career objective above, I would like to use the “ABC approach – Attitude, Background and Competency” to share about myself. I have a proactive and continuously self-study attitude (A) where I never stop learning to improve myself and simultaneously sharing back to the community through training and consulting sessions. With this attitude, I have achieved a good background (B) in both study and work that help me much in balancing between personal growth and community knowledge contribution. However, regarding C, I find myself with opportunities to improve in leadership and communication where I need to inspire others and integrate them in teams to deliver joint community-oriented objectives (and simultaneously, team members can complementarily learn and grow together) - this is also the leadership style that I aim to grow toward.
I have studied carefully training content on the IATSS Forum, I learn that the 2-month course is organized to develop Asia next-generation talents though concept of “thinking and learning together,” focusing on leadership style of maximizing use of group power toward achieve objectives. I believe that the skills are to be developed through seminars, field studies, group studies and culture exchange between young professionals from ASEAN in an integrated and cross-cultural environment. I am very happy to learn IATSS now offers me golden opportunities to improve myself to become a community leader that makes society better.
Finally, this is also the first time I visit Japan - a country that I have much respect for culture and civilization (in fact, I am inspired by Japanese spirit in several senses, one of them is “planning” and “continuous improvement” work-style). I commit to wholeheartedly devote these two months in Japan to learn, explore and absorb knowledge from Japan – the two months that I expect to be a memorable milestone of my life.
Looking forward to meet you all in Japan, in weeks.
Cheers,
Thuan

It has been 3 months since I left IATSS FORUM, a memorable part of my life. A bright dot among several dots that I am trying to connect to spark up meaning of life.

IATSS was a good period of time, all participant said so. I won’t necessarily repeat the same message because I feel the same way too. What I would like to emphasize here is how “we” and “new we” can share back learned value to community. If we can do this, this is a meaningful “thank-you” to the IATSS Team and even to Mr. Soichiro Honda – the founder of this fellowship.

As an IATSS alumnus, I try to share value since I finished the program. Within my capacity, I do my best to spread out image of IATSS to community. Fortunately, I have certain public involvement and I did leverage this to do the sharing job. This is important since IATSS image is undoubtedly good, but awareness has not been so popular in Vietnam till date.

Coming from a personal interview that HanoiTV requests me to share personal experience from the trip, I convinced them to extend program to fully cover IATSS picture including activities like: featuring of IATSS Open day in Ho Chi Minh city, interviewing Vietnam Secretariat teams…The Hanoi TV program ran and IATSS message reached thousands of people.

Another thing, more meaningful, that I have done is that I organized a big conference on Moku agri-culture business model - a nice story to tell to community. This is truly what we learn from Japan and thus want to share from Japan, well- connected with IATSS theme. Moku Moku is a good agri-business model and truly symbolizes sustainable community development. The model balances well social development with economic results and environmental development. I saw opportunities to bring this model to Vietnam since this is presently one of problem facing us. Vietnam suffers unclean agri-products, Vietnam agriculture has good products but sold cheap because value falls into hands of middleman. And those who do the same model (much simpler) in Vietnam are only at embryonic phase without sustainability.

The conference titled “Moku Moku business model innovation – from farm to table” was spoken by myself, another Japanese expert and another Vietnamese expert. Hosting around 300 participants (agri-business enthusiasts), co-organized by JCI and VIFA, placed at Vietnam Japan Cooperation Centre (VJCC), the event made a good impression to public about Japan agriculture way and IATSS value generation. There are several TV news, programs about this event, let alone dozens of newspaper articles running the news about it.

By these two activities, I make small yet practical contribution to bring IATSS value to Vietnam, and I do not want to stop there. Further activities will be done by us here in Vietnam through VIFA.

For new participants of IATSS, my little advice is all about “seizing the opportunity”. You need to prepare seriously before arriving in Japan, structurally absorbing knowledge and reserve some time for reflection, noting-down important details (because you simply will forget things given fast pace of IATSS daily agenda), and bring some value from Japan to your country, practical value in whatever capacity you can think of. This is the best “thank-you” to the program.