Data mining as a data analysis technology is becoming more and more widely used in the field of education. The article firstly studies the theory of data mining technology under the analysis of AI productivity, proposes an improved algorithm of Apriori to improve the mining speed of association rules, and finally proposes a model of student cultivation in higher vocational colleges and universities based on relevant theoretical research. Under the guidance of the model and assumptions, a higher vocational college in Zhejiang Province is used as the research object to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm and model proposed in this paper and to analyze the relationship between student cultivation, student performance, and student employment. By using association rules and other methods to mine student employment data and calculate the factors affecting student employment, such as the province of the employment unit, the type of city of the employment unit, the student’s major, and the student’s place of origin. From this, it can be concluded that data mining technology can provide many effective data analyses for the cultivation of students in higher vocational colleges and universities through fair and objective statistics and analysis in order to better promote the talent cultivation program of higher vocational colleges and universities.