The speakers at international seminar on Enabling Employment have stressed the need for improved liaison between the industry and academia, revision of skill education curriculum with special focus on job placement and creation of a platform to assist the government in policy formulation for creation job opportunities for the youth.
The seminar was organized by National Logistics Cell (NLC) in collaboration with Ministry Overseas Pakistanis and Human Development at Aiwan-e-Sadr here on Thursday. Industry leaders & Associations, representatives of chambers of commerce, policy makers, national and international donors and experts on skill education attended the seminar. The participants focused on issues related to current professional education & vocational training, market & employers' demand and policy reforms for capacity building.
In his opening remarks, Director General NLC Maj Gen Muhammad Asim Iqbal highlighted the role of NLC in promoting skill and vocational education. He said that NLC was running five technical institutes in the country and had so far trained 56,000 youth from across the country. He pointed out that due to disconnect between academia and industry even skilled workers were finding it hard to get employment. On the other hand, industry is faced with severe shortfall of suitable tradesmen.
"The lopsided issue of demand and supply at the industry level is primarily due to non compatible curricula, limited training infrastructure, inadequate skills of teaching staff, lack of interface between industry and academia," he said.
DG NLC said the challenge was both qualitative and quantitative adding that, technical and vocational education did not meet international standards. In order to make skill development responsive to the need of market, the entire system of technical and vocational education requires urgent overhauling. "We can emulate or even customize successful models and international best practices being followed by developed countries and successful economies," he added.
Sayed Zulfiqar Abbas Bukhari, Special Assistant to PM on Overseas Pakistanis & Human Development, Lieutenant General Khalid Asghar (Retd) Rector NUTECH, Andrew Baird, President & CEO EFE USA, Prof Dr Murtaza Jafferi Head of NCA, Dr Nadeem ul Haque, Executive VC PIDE, Romy Hawatt, CEO Founder RIANA Group UAE, Harvey John Bennett, Chief Strategic Officer & Founder Searchie and other renowned speakers addressed the seminar. President Dr Arif Alvi was the chief guest of the seminar.
The speakers discussed challenge and opportunities posed by growing population of the country. They said that the youth bulge has the potential to turn the socio-economic conditions of Pakistan if provided relevant training required by employers and the market. The experts were of the opinion that new technologies were fast emerging and so were the modes of knowledge delivery. -PR