Secretary — Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union
Organized and coordinated university-level programs, workshops and events engaging over 1,500 students — where I learned to run a team three years before I was asked to lead one at work.
The role
As Secretary of the Youth Union for the Faculty of Information Systems at UIT, I planned and ran programs, workshops and events at university level, reaching more than 1,500 students.
In practice that meant: proposing the program, getting it approved, securing budget and venue, recruiting and coordinating volunteers, running the event itself, and reporting on it afterwards.
What it actually taught me
A plan is only as good as the person you assigned each step to. An unowned task is not a task. This is the single most transferable lesson, and it is exactly what I now do with a delivery plan at work.
Volunteers teach you real management. Nobody in a student organisation can be compelled to do anything. If people do not understand why the work matters, they simply do not show up. Learning to make the purpose clear — rather than the instruction clear — is a skill I have never stopped using.
Logistics is a discipline. Rooms get double-booked. Equipment fails. Someone drops out the night before. The people who run good events are not the ones with the best ideas; they are the ones who thought about what happens when a step fails.
Speaking to a room. Two hundred people, a microphone, and a program that has to start on time. Presentation stopped being frightening somewhere in the middle of those three years, which is why walking into a client workshop now does not feel like a big deal.
Why it is on a technical portfolio
Because this is where my leadership came from, not from work. When I was asked to lead a four-person data team at FPT IS in 2025, the mechanics — set the goal, assign owners, make progress visible, unblock people — were already familiar. I had been practising them since 2021, with a harder crowd.
To expand: specific programs and what each one taught me.
Want the detail behind this?
Happy to walk through the technical decisions in a conversation.