According to the General Secretary and President, attracting talent must go hand in hand with proper utilisation and the assignment of specific tasks. He urged authorities to boldly study the removal of barriers to appointing talented people to management positions, while ensuring that talent utilisation is accompanied by integrity, accountability and a spirit of public service.

He underlined that the most sustainable source of talent must come from Vietnamese people themselves, calling for a fundamental reform of thinking and approaches to talent management.

He requested the Government, ministries, sectors and localities to clearly identify major problems requiring talent to solve, together with specific objectives, expected outputs, deadlines, resources, authority and assessment criteria. Policies on remuneration, he said, must be commensurate with capabilities, assigned tasks and actual results.

Resources should be concentrated on strategic tasks, centres of excellence, strong research teams, young talent training and the attraction of leading experts, he stated, adding that the utilisation of talent must be accompanied by clearly defined tasks, authority, resources and responsibility for results. Each key talent should be assigned a comprehensive package covering objectives, decision-making authority, the right to select collaborators, infrastructure, data, funding, remuneration, responsibilities and expected outputs. Importantly, strategic talent must also be responsible for building institutional capacity by developing teams, training successors, transferring knowledge, standardising processes and creating data and intellectual property assets.

He called for expanding opportunities for talent to contribute and move between institutions and sectors, and creating an open, flexible, dynamic and, above all, effective working environment. Vietnamese representative agencies abroad should play a greater role in identifying and connecting experts and building networks of partners in concrete fields where the country has needs.

The top leader also called for a truly competitive mechanism to attract international talent, including considering the issuance of a “Vietnam Talent Visa” with a transparent one-stop procedure and clear processing deadlines. Such a mechanism should comprehensively address issues relating to salaries, residence, employment, taxation, housing, health care, education and recognition of qualifications for talented individuals and their families.

He further stressed the need to reform talent management and measure performance based on results, with clear accountability. Heads of agencies and organisations must be responsible for identifying, selecting, assigning tasks to and creating a suitable working environment for talent, and must be held accountable for losing capable people due to weak, unfair or restrictive working environments.

General Secretary and President Lam called for the development of digital management infrastructure and a national talent database interconnected with education, science and technology, employment and labour-market data. The system should support forecasting, talent identification and matching talented people with national development tasks.

He also stressed the importance of specialised training programmes for gifted students, stronger international cooperation in strategic fields, greater autonomy for universities and research institutes alongside accountability, and a stronger role played by businesses in identifying talent needs, training, research, investment and commercialisation.

Concluding the session, the top leader requested that the national strategy be further refined to be concise, focused and capable of delivering substantive institutional breakthroughs.

The ultimate goal, he stressed, is to generate new projects, technologies, businesses, policies and values, build a workforce capable of driving rapid, sustainable and self-reliant national development, and create opportunities for all capable Vietnamese people to be identified, developed and given chances to contribute to the country./.