Built by ISG.

In 2019, on a construction site in Dubai, Morad Wahba was part of the ISG team putting the finishing touches on a brand-new campus for the University of Wollongong in Dubai. Concrete became lecture halls. Drawings became laboratories, breakout spaces and a library. Morad, then Design Manager on the project and now ISG’s Head of Design, remembers the handover well, the pride of watching a set of plans become a place where thousands of students would build their futures. Nobody on site that year could have known just how personally that would turn out to be true for ISG itself.

Among the students who would go on to fill those lecture halls was Eiman Jahanzeb, drawn to a UOWD campus known for pushing students toward real-world experience rather than theory alone. She didn’t set out to work in construction, and she didn’t expect artificial intelligence to become her focus either. What she was looking for, she says, was a place that would let her get properly stuck into a business rather than just observe one from the sidelines, she just didn’t expect to find it back inside the very campus ISG had delivered.

What connects those two moments is not a formal programme, but a shared belief in what real-world experience should do. An internship aimed at exposing students to the realities of a business: the competing priorities, imperfect processes and changing tools that rarely appear neatly in a classroom.

That context matters because the workplace Eiman and her cohorts are entering is changing quickly. Artificial intelligence and automation are reshaping how work gets done, and the challenge is not only for a younger generation entering the workforce. Experienced professionals are adapting at the same time. Increasingly, the valuable skill is not simply knowing how to use technology, but understanding how to connect it with people, processes and real business needs.

That is how Eiman came to work directly on ISG’s AI transformation, speaking with teams across different departments, understanding how work gets done, questioning where friction sits and exploring where new tools could make a practical difference. The role is technical in places, but much of it starts with listening, asking questions and understanding the people behind a process.

Eiman says: “I hadn’t had much exposure to automation before, so I was curious to see what it would look like inside a real business. As a Business Analytics student, I wanted to take what I’d been learning in the classroom and see where it could take me in practice — I went in wanting to explore something new, and ended up getting far more hands-on with process improvement than I expected.”

That idea of shaping what comes next brings the story back to Morad. He helped design the halls where Eiman studied for her degree in Business Analytics. Seven years later, Eiman is now helping shape some of the systems and processes that Morad and his colleagues work within. The connection was never planned, but it gives the original project a different kind of legacy.

It is a small story within a much larger business, but it captures the idea behind Thrive. Morad helped create a place designed for people to learn and develop. Eiman used that environment to build her own skills. Alia later recognised where those skills and Eiman’s potential could meet a real need inside ISG. And the internship has given Eiman the opportunity to contribute back into the business in a way that is useful to both her and the teams around her.

That exchange of value is important. Thriving is not simply about creating an opportunity for someone else; it happens when people, capability and business need come together in a way that allows everyone involved to move forward.

It is also reflected in how Eiman approaches the work. “There’s always an easier way to do things,” she says. “It’s become a bit of a motto for me – a reminder not to accept the way something has always been done as the only way it can be done.”

From a campus delivered by ISG, to a student learning within it, to that same student now helping ISG rethink how work gets done, the story has come full circle. Not because anyone planned it that way, but because at each stage there was an opportunity to build something useful for what came next.