People Aren’t the Weakest Link. They’re the Whole Point.

There is a phrase that gets repeated often in data protection circles: people are the weakest link. Dr. Celine Chew has spent a decade at Straits Interactive proving the opposite.

As Head of Learning & Development at one of Asia’s leading data governance and protection consultancies, Dr. Celine has built her practice on a conviction that runs against the grain of most compliance training: that the goal is not to get people to follow rules, but to help them understand why the rules exist. Because understanding is what changes behaviour. Rules just change paperwork.

“People are an organisation’s greatest assets,” she says. “If we stop asking the hard questions, if we stop understanding why something matters, that’s where we fail. And that’s also part of the breaches we are seeing.”

Start With the Why, Not the What

When Dr. Celine moved into data protection L&D, the conventional approach was clear: start with the regulations, cover the principles, explain what organisations must do to comply. She took a different route.

Instead of opening with the rules, she opens with the story behind them. Why Singapore needed a data protection law. How trust functions as the foundation of any digital economy. How cross-border data flows and developments like Europe’s GDPR have reshaped what accountability actually means for every organisation handling personal data.

That shift in starting point changes everything downstream. Learners stop seeing data protection as paperwork and start seeing it as a business responsibility with real consequences.

“Once they see the context, they are more likely to apply the principles thoughtfully,” she says. “Not just mechanically.”

The same logic carries into her AI governance programmes. Rather than walking learners through frameworks in the abstract, she uses real cases like the UK Post Office Horizon scandal, where over-trust in technology produced catastrophic outcomes, to make the stakes concrete. Business professionals working on AI projects need to understand that their judgment is not optional. It is the last line of defence.

“People are not the weakest link. They are an organisation’s greatest asset. And if they stop asking hard questions, that’s where the failures begin.”

A PE Teacher’s Lesson That Never Left

Dr. Celine’s approach to learning design did not come from a conference room. It came from a netball court.

Early in her career, she was a PE teacher trying to help students who struggled to shoot accurately. The standard advice was to practise more. She noticed that practising more without understanding why the shot was going wrong produced very little improvement. What worked was breaking the skill down, scaffolding the technique, and helping each student understand the relationship between their body, the ball, and the hoop.

With the right scaffolding, seven in ten students improved their shooting in 45 minutes. Without it, the same improvement could take days.

“When the learning method is based on understanding the individual learner and getting the right scaffold, effective learning takes place,” she says. “That principle has carried through everything I’ve done since.”

It shows up directly in her data protection programmes, where every session includes hands-on activities grounded in each learner’s actual work context. Data inventory mapping. Risk identification. Consent scenarios tailored to whether the organisation works with volunteers, donors, or corporate clients. Incident response exercises are built around what those specific learners will genuinely face.

“Success is when they can take the experience from the class and reflect on decisions they’ve made in the past. Having it practical, in their context, and in progression. They build from awareness into application into independent judgment.”

On Making the Case Upward

Dr. Celine’s approach to senior stakeholders follows the same logic she applies to learners: start with what they actually care about.

For most senior leaders, that means risk, reputation, resource, and uncertainty. So she frames data protection not as a compliance obligation but as a business issue. What does non-compliance actually cost? What does good data governance unlock? A pilot programme, she has found, moves the conversation faster than any concept paper, because it replaces opinion with evidence from their own people.

“The unfamiliar ideas become less threatening,” she says. “It gives stakeholders confidence that innovation can be managed, not just theorised about.”

What the Future of L&D Actually Requires

Dr. Celine’s view of where the profession needs to go is grounded in a shift she is already watching in real time. The next five to ten years will not reward L&D functions that help people acquire knowledge faster. The question will be whether people can think better, especially alongside AI.

Tools will give answers. The harder capability, and the one no tool can replace, is knowing when to trust those answers, when to challenge them, and what assumptions to interrogate before acting on them.

“The future challenge for L&D is not to help people use AI faster,” she says. “It’s to help people think better with AI.”

Her phrase for what that requires: AI bilingualism. Deep domain expertise, combined with enough understanding of AI to know when it is helping and when it is leading you somewhere you should not go. Being able to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Staying accountable for decisions that technology informed but did not make.

“The future challenge for L&D is not helping people use AI faster. It’s helping people think better with AI, and remain accountable for the decisions AI cannot make for them.”

For Dr. Celine Chew, the through-line from that netball court to a data governance classroom in Singapore is the same question she has always been asking: what does this particular person actually need to understand in order to apply this well? The context changes. The regulations evolve. The tools get more powerful. But the answer has always started with the same place: the human being sitting in front of her, and what it will take for them to genuinely get it.

Dr. Celine Chew is one of Asia’s featured voices in the aTalent × Docebo Trailblazer Campaign — spotlighting the region’s most influential L&D leaders. Learn more at trailblazer.atalent.com