My teaching increasingly focuses on the skills that make students employable. Students should understand why a concept matters beyond the assessment task. When I introduce knowledge with a clear workplace application, I sometimes tell them it will not be on the exam, but that a future manager might expect them to know it.
This is consistent with constructivist learning theory, particularly Jean Piaget's emphasis on how students construct new knowledge by bridging concepts to prior knowledge and relevant contexts. I try to help students structure ideas they can use later in response to a workplace question. That is a commitment to meaningful learning and transfer — not a claim that students will retain or apply everything simply because they have seen a workplace example.
My teaching is still evolving around whether students can identify the importance of their learning and apply it to their profession. Employability, meaningful work and a decent standard of living are what I hope education enables them to pursue.
Connecting concepts with professional practice
In my Agentic AI class, I stress that HR must play an active role in deploying AI-based tools because they affect job design directly. Students examine what happens to employees' duties, what work remains human, and who is responsible for supervising AI agents. A recent visit to Zand Bank in Dubai, where students met the Chief AI Officer and saw the bank's own agents and guardrails, turned those questions into a working example. Their written reflections showed a tangible interest in the professional use of the subject — not proof of mastery, but evidence of purpose.
AI literacy and data-informed decisions
Two skills run through my teaching: AI literacy and the use of data analysis to inform business decisions. The Zand Bank visit made the link between technological autonomy and managerial accountability concrete. In analytics courses, I focus on the analytical task and the business question it should answer, so that students can apply knowledge when a choice has to be made at work.