From digital transformation to employability and international expansion, education in Southeast Asia is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Today, Decision Lab is proud to formally launch its Education Practice, a dedicated unit designed to help educators and investors navigate one of the world’s most dynamic markets, led by Giang and Sylvia.
Education across Southeast Asia is entering a defining decade, not because of a lack of opportunity, but because the cost of making decisions wrong has never been higher.
As private education expands and international competition intensifies, parents and students are becoming more informed, and more demanding. Governments are pushing ambitious digital agendas to ensure systems remain relevant. Yet, many leaders still face the same hurdle: making high-stakes decisions without sufficiently deep local insight.
Decision Lab’s Education Practice was created to bridge this gap: helping educators and education groups, international institutions and investors, and also policy and ecosystem stakeholders to navigate complexity with evidence, human understanding, and clear judgment.
Giang brings more than 15 years of leadership experience across technology, FMCG, and education, with a career spanning both global organisations and local market execution.
Most recently, she served as Vietnam Country Lead for Google for Education, where she played a central role in accelerating digital learning across schools and universities nationwide. Working closely with education authorities, universities, and technology partners, Giang helped align global best practices with Vietnam’s rapidly evolving education landscape.
She is also a frequent speaker at universities and education forums, and brings with her a strong regional network across educators, policymakers, and industry partners.
“Education leaders today are navigating enormous change, from digitalisation and international competition to employability and skills relevance,” Giang says.
“Our role is to bring clarity. By combining rigorous research with deep local context, we help organizations make strategic decisions that work not just for today, but for the long term."
Based in Indonesia, Sylvia complements Giang’s commercial and transformation expertise with deep research and public-sector experience.
Before joining Decision Lab, Sylvia previously worked within an education and research unit under Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, where she helped design evidence-based programmes and gained first-hand insight into how education decisions are shaped in highly regulated systems, focused on education quality, user experience, and system-level impact.
With over a decade of experience as a researcher and strategist, Sylvia brings a rigorous, human-centered approach to understanding how students, parents, educators, and institutions make decisions, particularly in complex, regulated environments like Indonesia.
“Good education policy and strong education institutions both start with evidence,” Sylvia explains.
“Our work is about uncovering real behaviour: How students choose, how parents decide, how institutions earn trust, and turning those insights into strategies that actually work on the ground.”
Together, Giang and Sylvia give Decision Lab a unique dual-market leadership across Vietnam and Indonesia, two markets with very different regulatory dynamics, parent expectations, and decision-making logics.
Southeast Asia is fast becoming one of the world’s most compelling education regions:
Yet the region remains underserved by insight-driven consulting that truly understands local decision-making dynamics, from parent expectations and student aspirations to regulatory complexity and cultural nuance.
Decision Lab was built to solve this exact challenge.
Decision Lab’s Education Practice supports clients across the full education ecosystem:
We help universities and schools:
We support regional and global players by:
We provide independent, evidence-based insight to:
Across all engagements, our role is the same: Turn insight into confident decisions.
Decision Lab already has deep experience supporting education clients across Southeast Asia, from international universities and K-12 groups to chambers of commerce and education-linked investors.
Our work has helped institutions refine brand positioning, improve enrolment outcomes, design new programmes, and better understand how education decisions are made in markets like Vietnam, one of the most exciting and complex education markets globally.
The launch of this dedicated Education Practice marks our transition from providing research to becoming a long-term strategic partner.
Decision Lab’s ambition is clear:
To build the leading commercial consulting practice for education in Southeast Asia.
As Thue Quist Thomasen, CEO of Decision Lab, explains:
“Education sits at the intersection of social impact and commercial reality. Institutions are under pressure to grow, differentiate, and remain relevant, while staying true to their mission.
With Giang and Sylvia leading our Education Practice, we are uniquely positioned to help clients navigate this complexity with evidence, empathy, and confidence.”
With strong leadership, deep research capability, and local insight across key ASEAN markets, Decision Lab’s Education Practice is ready to partner with those shaping the future of learning in Southeast Asia.
Ready to shape the future of learning?
Connect with Giang: dhtg@decisionlab.co or Sylvia: sap@decisionlab.co to explore how local insight can power your regional growth.