20 years of setting her heart in tourism human resource

Tran Thi Xuan Quyen- Director of IRR consultancy training co.- The founder of the Vietnam-Australia Hotel Management School

You have been with the work of consultancy and professional human resource training in the field of hospitality for over 20 years. What opportunity brought you to the current work?

Education in an interesting sector for it accompanies the whole society, taking part in making values of man, contributing in the national competitions. I came to the sector as a chance.

Over 20 years, I graduated with the major in tourism. In 1998, together with my family, I had a start-up with a catering company- Ben Thanh Caterers: we provided 10,000 meals daily for large companies and enterprises as Coca-Cola, P&G, Mercedes and offices in office buildings. However, a problem the enterprises had to deal with was their staff had no basic knowledge of how to communicate, how to serve customers, how to set party tables and working tables in meetings. To solve the problem, enterprises asked me to train their staff how to arrange and serve tea breaks in a proper way.

Until 2005, thanks to increasing need from the market, we decided to found the Vietnam- Australia Hotel Management School for hospitality training with over 3,000 students. In 2017, we handed it over. Probably, I still have something with the field of education. In 2020, I founded IRR Consultancy Training Company.

After 20 years working in the field of human resource training for the tourism and hospitality sector, how do you evaluate the human resource of the field in Vietnam, its strong points and weak points?

Vietnam tourism has had remarkable growth, showing through impressive figures in the number of guests, the total turn-over and trusted awards they gained worldwide. In Vietnam, the trend of investing in restaurants, hotels and 5-star resorts has been increasing with no signs of reduction. Therefore, needs for internationally qualified human resource have always been a must.

The human resource has been much improved. They have professional training and qualified to integrate to programs of international standards.

Vietnam has an advantage of having young staff who is eager to learn and has good knowledge. So that international guests usually have good impression to Vietnam. Besides, an amount of knowledge to help them have more efficiency should be modified, but it depends on enterprises.

Enterprises should invest in in-house training, set service procedures and code of etiquettes, and should have policies, professional environment, and team spirit… in order to have friendly qualified staff. If they can do that, Vietnam tourism will have more strong points in competitions with other regional countries.

What core value and basic knowledge does IRR bring to students?

With our students, IRR always understands thoroughly and knows the needs from markets and enterprises besides giving outstanding skill training.

In our courses, IRR has set realistic detailed syllabus. Instead of the normal lecture giving and note taking progress, IRR has another way of teaching. Students research documents in advance, represent them from what they understood and discuss them with one another. Finally, lecturers give a conclusions based on what students represented.

We also set priority on practice. For example, in chef training class, we let students go straight into kitchen, without having to learn about kitchen plans and functions. Practice helps them learn quickly.

IRR has also paid attention in helping students have confidence through soft skill courses with lecturer are senior experts working in 5-star hotel system. We assure our students when graduated will be the best and the most professional staff. Employers will not have to train them again.