GEMS CEO Dino Varkey: UAE schools must prepare kids for jobs that do not exist

Dino Varkey, the Group Chief Executive Officer of GEMS Education, puts a blunt target on schools: they cannot just train children for the next job. “The goal of education today cannot simply be preparing students for their first job. It must prepare them for a lifetime of reinvention across industries and careers that may not even exist yet,” he told Arabian Business.

In the same interview, Varkey ties that career-shift thesis to the way schools already had to operate during regional disruption, moving quickly between in-person, online, and hybrid learning. For GEMS Education, that meant shifting students across 47 UAE schools to fully online learning while maintaining 100% synchronous classes. On the first day alone, more than 145,000 students accessed online lessons, and average lesson attendance during the wider disruption period reached 91%.

That’s not a feel-good tech story. It’s an operational and governance story. Varkey argues that schools are now judged on more than academic outcomes, including whether they can maintain continuity, support wellbeing, and adapt quickly when normal operations are interrupted. In other words, “learning continuity” and “student support under stress” are becoming part of the performance scorecard, whether boards like the phrase or not.

The context matters. The UAE education sector entered the disruption period with an advantage, according to Varkey, because digital infrastructure, blended learning, and future-focused teaching models were already being developed as part of a long-term strategy. He points to “years of sustained and carefully planned investment in innovation and educational technology,” specifically calling out digital infrastructure, blended learning capabilities, and future-focused teaching models. He also credits coordination between regulators, educators, and school operators for enabling faster decisions while keeping academic continuity and student wellbeing in focus.

This is where second-order implications show up for decision-makers. If regulators and operators can move quickly while protecting continuity and wellbeing, then resilience becomes a capability to build, not an emergency response plan to dust off later. Varkey also frames education as economic infrastructure, not just a social service: for countries trying to attract talent, support families, and build future industries, schools are part of competitiveness. That framing has real budget implications, because investments in innovation, technology, and teacher development are less likely to be treated as optional modernization and more likely to be treated as national growth infrastructure.

Varkey insists that online and hybrid learning should be permanent parts of modern education, but he rejects the idea that this is a divorce from the classroom. The disruption period, he says, demonstrated that technology can support access, flexibility, continuity, and personalisation. At the same time, he emphasizes why physical schools still matter for communication, collaboration, mentorship, emotional development, and peer interaction. His line is “The future is not fully digital or fully traditional. It is intelligently integrated.”

So what does integration mean day-to-day? He argues that digital tools work best for revision, diagnostics, personalised practice, and flexible access to content. Face-to-face learning remains essential for discussion, leadership, creativity, collaboration, and emotional growth. The strongest schools, in his view, will not treat online and offline as competing models. They will intentionally integrate both, using each where it creates the strongest learning impact.

Then there is AI, which Varkey calls one of the biggest shifts education has faced in decades. The potential, he says, includes changing how schools identify learning gaps, personalise support, and reduce administrative work for teachers. But for GEMS, the focus is on using AI to support students and educators rather than replace the human role of teaching. “Our philosophy is simple: AI for personalisation, humans for transformation,” Varkey said. He also notes that GEMS Education launched the Global Education AI Hub last year to co-develop ethical and inclusive AI solutions across personalised learning, tutoring, school operations, wellbeing, and curriculum design.

He flags boundaries as essential, not academic. Academic integrity, privacy, wellbeing, and responsible use are described as central risks as AI adoption expands. GEMS promotes safe and responsible AI use through structured guidance and awareness sessions for students aged 13 and above, teachers and professional staff. Importantly, Varkey says AI will not reduce the importance of teachers. “If anything, it will make good teachers even more valuable,” he argued, because when information is more accessible, the ability to inspire, mentor, guide, and develop human potential becomes even more important.

All of this loops back to why he believes the old model is under pressure. Traditional systems were built around predictability, standardisation, and knowledge recall. But Varkey argues the labour market rewards people who can embrace and solve unfamiliar problems, learn continuously, and adapt quickly as industries evolve, especially in a world shaped by automation, AI, and constant industry change. He says knowledge is no longer enough because information is instantly accessible through technology and AI.

Skills like adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, and emotional resilience are described as becoming central to future readiness, and he does not treat those as separate from academic performance. Inquiry-led learning, collaboration, and applied problem-solving can support stronger academic outcomes while preparing students for work and life beyond school. Teacher development becomes critical because as content becomes easier to access, the role of educators moves toward mentoring, guiding, facilitating, and developing human potential. Varkey’s framing is “The future of education requires both excellence in outcomes and excellence in human development.”

Finally, he notes that parents are evaluating schools more holistically than a decade ago. Academic results still matter, but families increasingly focus on wellbeing, emotional resilience, values, and whether schools prepare children for a fast-changing and uncertain world. The pandemic, he says, gave parents greater visibility into classrooms and a deeper understanding of how children learn. More recent global instability reinforced schools as sources of stability, community, and emotional support. Parents, in his description, ask broader questions: “Will my child be ready to thrive in a rapidly changing world?” not just “Will my child succeed academically?”

For boards, school operators, investors, and education leaders, the stake is simple: the bar for modern schooling is moving from test performance alone to a full system capability, including resilience during disruption and responsible adoption of AI. The schools that can prove they do both may gain long-term credibility with regulators and families. The ones that treat this as a short-term technology rollout risk being judged, quickly and publicly, on outcomes that matter outside the classroom too.