Employee retention is considered the greatest challenge for businesses in Vietnam this year, said Navigos Group, the leading and largest executive recruitment solution provider in the country.

According to a survey conducted by the group in the first quarter of this year, 63.8 percent of respondents from 168 companies operating in Vietnam including foreign-invested ones ranked the employee retention as the number one human resource challenge in 2010.

This result is not surprising as it has been a hot topic in many recent human resource discussions.

“Vietnamese employees aggressively pursue opportunities to accelerate their career track to senior positions, challenging work, stretch assignments, continual training and development and competitive pay”, said Navigos Group Managing Director Nguyen Thi Van Anh.

“As long as this is the fact, employee retention is hard work”, she added.

The second amongst the top five challenges for the businesses this year is how to hire the best talent, said the survey.

“It has never been easy to find the right and best talent in Vietnam and the situation will remain unchanged in the near future”, Anh commented.

Career development management, attracting candidates to the organisations and succession planning filled in the top five 2010 human resource challenges with 54.3 percent, 44.1 percent and 38.3 percent of the votes, respectively.

“Getting the right people into the right job with the right skills and to have them stay and grow are missions which will keep human resource personnel busy in 2010”, she concluded.

The survey also found that the majority of those businesses are planning to increase their budget for human resource development, even up 120 percent over the previous year./.