The most radical career move isn’t climbing the ladder. It’s jumping off when you realize you’re climbing the wrong building.

Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc spent 13 years at Sacombank, rising from credit officer to Deputy CEO. She had status, security, and success. She had everything most professionals spend their entire careers chasing. Then, in 2007, surrounded by the pressures of banking’s golden age, she made a decision that confused everyone who knew her.

She quit. Not to join a competitor. Not to start a fintech company. She quit to work with children under age six.

Today, she runs Montessori facilities serving families who understand that the years before kindergarten determine everything that follows. But the journey from corner office to classroom reveals something more important than career pivots. It reveals what happens when someone discovers their true calling isn’t where they thought it would be.

The Banking Empire She Built

For 13 years, Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc dedicated herself to Sacombank with intensity that consumed her life. She started as a credit officer, learning banking from the ground up. Through talent, determination and relentless effort, she climbed every level: Deputy Manager, Manager, Deputy Director, Branch Director, finally reaching Deputy CEO overseeing business operations.

This wasn’t luck or connections. This was earned. Every promotion came from delivering results that couldn’t be ignored. The work energized her. The challenges drove her. The achievements validated her. She believed this career would last until retirement because the trajectory seemed so clearly upward.

But beneath the external accomplishments, something was shifting. The higher she climbed, the more she questioned the deeper meaning of her work. Who was she becoming through this relentless pursuit? What value was she truly creating beyond quarterly reports and lending targets?

The questions felt uncomfortable because she had no immediate answers. So she pushed them down and kept climbing. Until 2007, when she couldn’t push them down anymore.

The Year Everything Stopped Making Sense

2007 brought chaos. The real estate market was booming. Credit growth was running hot. The pressure in banking became heavier than ever before. And in the midst of this intensity, Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc found herself asking questions that had no professional answers.

What value was she truly creating? Who was she becoming through this work?

Then, unexpectedly, a memory surfaced. She remembered herself as a child: shy, insecure, afraid to speak up even when she knew the answer. That image of her younger self came rushing back with surprising force. In that moment of reflection, surrounded by the pressures of high finance, she made a decision that would change everything.

She decided to stop. Not pause. Not take a sabbatical. Stop completely and walk away.

The First School: Learning by Building

In 2009, Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc launched her first educational venture: a comprehensive school covering primary through high school in District 7, Ho Chi Minh City. She started with just 142 students. Over the next decade, that number grew to 2,200 students. By external measures, the school was a success.

But even as student enrollment multiplied, she was learning something that would redirect her entire path. She began understanding that the most critical period in a child’s development wasn’t high school. It wasn’t even primary school. It was the years from birth to age six—those quiet, seemingly simple years when foundations get laid for everything that follows.

The realization felt uncomfortable. She had built a successful K-12 institution. But the most important work was happening earlier than her school started. This insight gnawed at her until she made another bold decision.

In 2017, she stepped away from the K-12 school to focus entirely on early childhood education using the Montessori method. She had found her true calling.

The Montessori Discovery

Today, Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc serves as Founder and CEO of Chan Thanh Services Corporation. Her core mission is early education for children aged zero to six using Montessori principles, combined with creative thinking education franchised from Finland. She has built and operates three Montessori facilities—two in Ho Chi Minh City and one franchise in Hanoi.

Her daily work revolves around strategic direction, communications, and training teachers to step back, observe, and respect each child’s natural rhythm of development. But perhaps more importantly, she supports busy parents in understanding that early education doesn’t happen only at school. It begins in the home.

The parents she serves are intellectuals with heavy responsibilities: office workers, mid-to-senior managers, business owners, freelancers. They have high pressure and limited time but refuse to sacrifice their children’s early years despite demanding schedules. They have abundant love but often lack calmness, time, and clear methodology for raising children in the modern world.

This is where Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc found purpose that banking could never provide.

The Story That Explains Everything

Two years ago, a family brought their four-and-a-half-year-old twins to one of her Clover schools. Neither child could speak a single word. Both were terrified of going outside. Whenever they encountered crowds, they would silently hide in corners, avoiding eye contact and sound. The family was well-off and had taken the children to many specialists and tried numerous methods without success.

Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc and her team made no promises of fluent speech. They set no rushed milestones. The only thing they did, every single day, was respect the children. They assigned dedicated teachers for six months of patient observation, persistent companionship, and acceptance of each child’s very slow rhythm. No pushing. No forcing. Just quietly waiting for understanding to emerge through love.

After six months, one child spoke two words. The other spoke a short sentence of about five words. But what made the mother cry wasn’t just the first words. It was seeing both children become more confident outside, happier among crowds. She sent photos of her children smiling.

That outcome captures everything about why Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc left banking. Financial success can’t compete with watching non-verbal children speak their first words. No quarterly earnings report will ever feel as meaningful as a mother’s tears of joy.

What Banking Taught Her About Education

The irony is that her 13 years in banking perfectly prepared her for building educational institutions. Banking taught her strategic thinking, operational management, and how to build and lead teams. Those capabilities transferred directly to creating schools, even though the industries seem completely different.

Leadership is leadership. Systems are systems. Team building is team building. The domain changes but the fundamentals remain consistent. This is why her educational ventures succeeded so quickly—she brought executive-level operational discipline to an industry that often lacks it.

But banking taught her something else equally important: what true value feels like. Processing loans creates economic activity. Helping children develop creates human potential. One is necessary. The other is transcendent. She needed banking to appreciate the difference.

The Family Foundation

Throughout her journey, family has been the greatest anchor. During the most difficult periods—especially when the pandemic threatened to force her business to close—her family provided the calm she needed to avoid rash decisions. Their quiet presence, free of pressure or judgment, gave her strength to continue even when everything felt fragile.

The values she pursues in life were formed and nurtured within her family: integrity in thought and action, honesty with herself and others, connection in relationships, willingness to share, foundation built on love. For her, family isn’t just a place to return to but a compass guiding every choice in work and life.

This matters for understanding her career pivot. She didn’t leave banking because she hated it. She left because family taught her what truly matters. And banking, despite its rewards, wasn’t aligned with those deeper values. Early childhood education is.

The Vision: Montessori for Everyone

Looking ahead, Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc dreams of building an ecosystem that helps parents apply Montessori principles in their own homes. She believes early education should not be a privilege reserved for the wealthy few but should be accessible in a thoughtful, practical way suited to modern family life.

She has no interest in opening many schools or chasing scale at any cost. Her priority is spreading the true spirit of Montessori: respecting children, preparing appropriate environments, and beginning with change in the adults. When parents understand correctly, act correctly, and maintain patience, children will develop in their own unique way without being pushed or compared.

Through her social media channels, she has built a community of more than 360,000 followers. These are parents learning to slow down, understand their children better, and change themselves to create positive family environments.

What This Teaches Founders

Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc’s transformation offers lessons that extend far beyond education. First, success in one field often prepares you for success in another. Her banking expertise translated directly to building educational institutions. Your current career is teaching you skills that will transfer to future endeavors in unexpected ways.

Second, listening to inner disquiet leads to profound transformation. Many people feel the questions she felt in 2007 but suppress them because external rewards seem too valuable to risk. She chose to honor those questions, and that courage opened a path she never could have planned.

Third, the most important work often happens in overlooked places. High school graduates get celebrated. But the truly transformative work happens in those quiet years from zero to six. The biggest impact often comes from serving populations and periods that receive the least attention.

Fourth, going deeper beats going wider. Instead of expanding her K-12 empire, she narrowed her focus to the earliest years of childhood because she understood that’s where greatest impact could be made. Sometimes the most ambitious choice is to specialize rather than scale.

The Bottom Line

The Deputy CEO who walked away from banking to teach toddlers sounds like someone who lost their mind. But Nguyen Huynh Thu Truc proves that the truly lost ones are those who keep climbing ladders they know lead nowhere meaningful.

She traded the corner office for the classroom and found more meaning in watching four-year-olds speak their first words than in any quarterly report she ever delivered. That’s not failure. That’s clarity about what actually matters.

For entrepreneurs and professionals reading this, her journey poses uncomfortable questions. Are you building something that aligns with your deepest values? Or are you climbing a ladder that leads somewhere you don’t actually want to go? She arrived at her answer through crisis and reflection. She chose a path that was slower, quieter, and infinitely more meaningful.

Today, she stands as proof that the most important work often happens in the earliest, most overlooked years of human life. And that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is walk away from success to find purpose.

The corner office is still there. She’s just not interested anymore. She’s too busy watching children discover themselves.

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Le Duc Anh CEO of OceanLabs – Founder of QVID