Unskilled

Eid Mubarak. Definitely I am failing my reading list miserably; the pile of unread material keeps growing and there just aren't enough hours in the day, or perhaps time management skills are seriously lacking. Nonetheless, rummaging through the pile came across the Coursera Global Skills Index (GSI) 2019, which they probably issued somewhere in March 2019.
This was their inaugural edition and they benchmarked 60 countries across business, technology and data science skills; reading through the report they issued, one almost wishes that Pakistan shouldn't have opted for the GSI, if at all there was an option.
Perhaps our rankings are the reason that the GSI was not discussed in the mainstream media at all, at least to my knowledge; except if we do not attack our short comings head on, we will remain where we are forever, unskilled.
So this is an attempt to highlight the ranking to those who can do something about it; and I sure hope those who matter read this. The key finding of the GSI is that there is a critical need to up-skill the global workforce; Pakistan falls in the lagging category in all three disciplines selected by Coursera, to put it mildly.
Ever since we became a consumer economy, and that too with a preference for imported goods, there was always a risk that in the case of domestic industries which were forced to shut down, since they could not compete with foreign manufactures, the relevant skill set would be lost with time.
However there was still positivity, based on assertions by the governments about impressive gains in the federal and provincial vocational training programs; the GSI ranking unfortunately paints a rather gloomy picture.
Of course they can be wrong, or even biased; albeit whatever the case may be, there is a need to get to the bottom of these rankings, because if they are right the Emperor needs to know we are all naked.
In the business category, the GSI ranking is based on competencies in accounting, finance, marketing, sales, management and communication, 6 in all; Pakistan is ranked 57th in this category with only Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Egypt trailing us.
At a personal level, the fact that Pakistan scored the lowest in accounting in the Asia Pacific region, 3%, even behind Bangladesh was rather irksome; our accounting Institutes needs to analyze this score, and quickly. Our score in the Sales subcategory was a whopping 0%!
Perhaps this ranking explains why our corporations lack the wherewithal to compete in the international markets and why we do not have a single company in the Forbes 500; and why we cannot construct a high rise in less than 5 years!
Or why all our businesses are dependent on monopoly rent for their profits.
According to an extract from the Pakistan Economic Survey 1979-80, tweeted by a friend who is the research editor with this very publication, the textile industry was under the constant watch of the Government back in those days, since it had not sufficiently responded to the incentives granted to it the year before; even after 50 years the industry needs the Governments help to meet its export targets.
Ease of doing business, or unease, might also have contributed to this horrible ranking, but not having the skills in the first place trumps everything else; and the skills in the business category are rather basic.
On the debate over what comes first, infrastructure or education, I have always cast my vote for the latter, and this particular ranking strengthens my view further, without education, no amount of infrastructure will result in economic stability.
And the bad news is yet to come.
The technology category covers computer networking, operating systems, Human Computer Interaction, Databases, security engineering and software engineering; in this Pakistan ranked 59th with an overall score of 2%, only Nigeria is behind us. In the Data sciences category, we score 2% and again are ranked 59th with Nigeria again the only country trailing us; data sciences subcategories include maths, statistics, machine learning, data management, statistical programming and data visualization.
In computer networking, operating systems, data management, machine learning, statistical programming and software engineering we score 2%, or less; I am a dinosaur when it comes to technology so really am unsure how we got these scores but somebody needs to figure out the how and why of this ranking.
Because if these rankings are kosher, then we are barking up the wrong tree with regards to our dreams about economic growth; start-ups and technology companies are completely dependent on skills and we are not going to achieve billions of dollars of software exports with these level of skills.
Thanks to the austerity drive thrust upon us by our creditors, we have slashed our development budget in the hope of reducing our fiscal deficit; nonetheless we perhaps need to spend whatever we have left on training our workers on a war footing, otherwise we as a nation will forever remain unskilled.
(The writer is a chartered accountant based in Islamabad. Email: [email protected])