jobs and business opportunities for youth and women

The exporters, stakeholders and participants of workshop urged the need to improve competitiveness of Pakistani economy by strengthening systems for workforce development, increased investment in human capital by the private sector, and improving access to trainings, jobs and business opportunities for youth and women. The said it during an interactive workshop entitled “Private sector engagement for professional development in Pakistan” jointly organized by USAID Pakistan Jobs Project in collaboration with its implementing partner in Pakistan, Voice Tel Tech (VTT) which is a strategy and management consulting firm, and National University of Science and Technology (NUST) here on Saturday.

Rizwan Shaukat Chief Executive Officer, Voice Tel Tech (VTT), presided over the proceedings. The faculty and carrier development center staff of NUST University, various senior and HR executives from the private sector and the students attended the event. The participating delegates focused to bridge the gap between the employer and skills in job markets market as final skill set. The underlying focus of this project is to create an enabling environment in Pakistan job markets so that job seekers better prepare themselves in finding the right jobs as well as progressing in their respective fields. Today’s workshop was part of a series of interventions under this umbrella focusing on getting all the stakeholders working on various tangents of the job market on a single forum so as they can jointly voice their concerns and eventually collectively identify their needs and joint initiatives as per the job market requirements.

It was told that the Pakistani higher education institutions in collaboration with Pakistan Jobs project and VTT were creating an eco system for improving the visibility of job seekers to the best companies in the job market. The need was to transform confusion into opportunity and provide job seekers appropriate guidance according to the skill requirements of industry and different companies. One of the facilitator highlighted that, despite being technically competent, job seekers do not focus themselves on skill development to improve their employability while citing a jobs project survey recently conducted in Pakistan.

The workshop aimed threefold job market aspects which included attempting to solicit skills requirements other than technical skills from diverse segments of the industry, to formulate professional development initiatives required to build these skills, and to initiate a long-term mechanism between industry and academia to over look these professional development initiatives.

The executives of private sector such as CISCO, Mobilink, Nokia, Siemens, World Bank, Alca tel, Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) and others expressed their expectations from academic institutions which included improvement in existing academic curriculum, grooming of fresh graduates for private sector jobs, skills required for jobs in addition to text books and stressed the need for efficient communications and IT skills including soft skills for good human resource in Pakistan. The American Business Council members and private sector executives also ensured full support to increase the capacity of skilled human capital in the country.

In the end, students and participants expressed their concerns over the prevailing culture of nepotism in the country and demanded that there should be effective institutional checks and balances as well as social accountability of such negative practices in the society particularly in job markets. Citing experiences of Canadian and UK universities, one of the students said that they have excellent career centers in their respective universities and Pakistan should also learn from successful international experiences. There was also a gap between teachers and students for counseling in their career paths. It was also maintained that parents and society should encourage the students to adopt careers in business or profitable sectors. They underlined the need for strengthening the linkages and coordination between industry and academia in Pakistan. The students of NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (SEECS) lauded the efforts of VTT and USAID for boosting the market-oriented job trends and for taking different initiatives aiming at a conducive job market environment in Pakistan.