Learning is a mindset — a lifelong journey, not a destination

Ask what prepares someone for a career in management, and the answer often begins with a degree earned years ago. We still treat education as an early investment expected to last an entire career. But the job usually changes long before the title does. AI, regional expansion, and teams that expect more than top-down instruction have changed what management demands. A degree gets you through the door, yet it cannot carry you through a 30-year career.

Business schools helped shape that discourse, but things are changing now. For decades, degree programs sat at the center of the traditional business-school model, while executive education developed alongside them as a separate track. A better model treats degrees and executive education as one continuum: providing people with a strong foundation, then giving them reasons to return as their jobs evolve. That is the model we are building at our school.

Employers can perpetuate the same divide. In Egypt, as elsewhere in the region, management development is still too often treated as a perk, and one of the first lines cut when budgets tighten, rather than a continuing investment in how the organization performs. Management development should be treated like maintenance on a company’s most expensive machinery: Skip it, and the cost shows up later, usually at the worst moment.

Executive Education at AUC Onsi Sawiris School of Business turns 60 this year, giving us a long view of what continuous learning looks like in practice. More than 11k alumni have passed through our programs, now standing at 45 and growing, over the past five years, with an average of 270 companies annually served by our offerings. This year our open-enrollment programs climbed to no. 69 in the Financial Times Executive Education Rankings, making us the only ranked institution from the Middle East and North Africa to make the list.

Preparing someone for their first big job is only the starting point. The harder test is whether a business school stays relevant through every job after that- and whether employers keep investing in managers after they hire them. Egypt needs managers who keep learning as the job keeps changing. When the job never stops changing, the people doing it cannot stand still.

Sherif Kamel, dean, AUC Onsi Sawiris School of Business

On Making It, Sherif Kamel and Patrick discuss what AI means for education in Egypt, from the classroom to national policy. Listen to the full episode here.