Meet the Practitioners Behind Breakout Labs: Bijil

When Bijil Subhash, PhD first messaged me in September 2025, he basically told me why hiring him wouldn’t work 😄

I’d posted that we were looking for contract instructors in Europe and Bijil reached out from Australia:

“I’m interested but may not be practical given the timezone differences between Australia and EU.”

Fair point, but we talked anyway 😄

Some months later, in April, Bijil taught his first class with us, and I was there with him. The thing I remember most vividly was his presence.

Bijil is incredibly calm when he teaches and there’s this almost Buddha-like energy about him 🧘

He makes an effort to listen. He’s comfortable with moments of silence, and he doesn’t rush to fill them. He gives people room to think & digest.

But no matter how natural someone is in the classroom, things don’t always go to plan. At one point during the session, Bijil improvised a demo, and surprise surprise, it didn’t go well 😄

Later, when we reflected on the session, that failed demo led us to talk about all the preparation & retrospection that goes into teaching.

Good teaching may look effortless but there’s a lot of work behind it: building a story around the topics, figuring out how to explain difficult concepts, drawing on your own experiences, preparing and testing your demos…

Anyway, during the call, I told him I believe he has something that’s much harder to prepare for: presence. And I encouraged him to pursue teaching, to do more of it.

He wanted to, but there was just this teeny tiny problem: Australia 🌏

The thing is: Most of Breakout Labs work is currently in Europe and I told Bijil I didn’t expect him to take those opportunities. The timezone difference is rough and the sessions can extend well into his evening.

He took them anyway, and since then, he’s taught several European classes with us.

I think that’s a testament to how much he enjoys teaching. Recently, when I asked him what he finds so satisfying about it, he said:

I see teaching as an opportunity to deepen my own understanding of the discipline while being able to give back to the community some of that intuition and knowledge.

It’s a two-way street. On one hand, his experience as an engineer gives him real stories and examples that make ideas stick.

And on the other, teaching makes him a better engineer, coach and mentor.

That’s exactly the kind of practitioner we want teaching at Breakout Labs.

If you strip everything else away from a training, the materials, the labs, all of it, and just put a real engineer in front of a classroom who’s motivated to teach and wants to share their stories, that alone is enough to make it a great learning experience.

So, Bijil, I’m glad the timezone warning in your first message didn’t stop us from talking.

And the call back in April where I said I hoped you’d do more teaching? I’m very glad you did ❤️