TECHNICAL and vocational education and training (TVET) is a tough market to untangle. No wonder we are still struggling with it. But given where we are as an economy, we cannot afford to dillydally for long.
We currently provide technical training to very few young people in our country. This is not only true of skills that are used in manufacturing or construction, it is also true of skills in service delivery (sometimes called soft skills). The result is that there is a significant unmet demand for skilled workers, but the supply is not there, leading to a gap. There is a skills mismatch too as the skills in demand are not the ones in which young people are trained or are attracted to.
The majority of skills training programmes that we currently have are also not of good quality. This is the same problem we have with our education system. Most schools offer a poor quality of education. Most skills providers offer training of poor quality. Additionally, skills programmes are not internationally accredited and often not recognised. Given our foreign currency needs, the government would be thrilled if more Pakistanis could go abroad to work and remit money back home. But we do not have skilled person power to do that.
In fact, the problems of the skills market run much deeper. Skills do not have a good reputation. People do not want their children to acquire skills; they want their children to be doctors and not nurses or health professionals; and they want their children to be engineers and not technicians. Some of this is understandable as doctors and engineers are paid more than nurses and technicians. But a lot of it is about reputation and how society perceives skills versus higher education and the choice of a career based on skills versus jobs in offices.
Skills do not have a good reputation.
I did a focus group discussion with young people, most of whom had cleared their matriculation examinations, in a village outside Sheikhupura a few years ago. The discussion made it clear that they thought a) after their education they did not want to do any skills-based work (no work with their hands); b) they were not inclined towards entrepreneurship; c) all of them wanted government jobs as they thought these were permanent, had good benefits as well as opportunities for graft and involved less work; and d) all of them were willing to pay a certain sum, whatever they or their parents could afford, to be able to get government jobs. The heroes in this crowd were the two or three young boys who had, over the last few years, been able to get jobs in the police and railways departments.
Why do skills have such a poor status in our society? Part of the answer lies in the historical development of society. The landed and moneyed did not need to work with their hands. Hired help did that work for them. One life objective was/is to reach that station where one has leisure or does higher mental work, while hired help does the menial work.
There are clear links of this to the client-patron models that have determined governance structures as well as hierarchy in our society for a long time. Jobs and economic opportunities are tied to patrons and their generosity. The state is one of the largest patrons if not the largest one. Government jobs offer the most security.
In many countries, some of the above dynamics changed as economies modernised, the manufacturing base expanded, specialisation increased and population growth was controlled. But these structural changes have not really taken place in Pakistan.
The result is people do not feel skills are respected and rewarded as they should be. And they are right. They do not want themselves or their children to be stuck in skill-based careers if they have a choice. This lack of demand also means we have few skill training programmes available. And this leads to the skill mismatch and unmet demand story that was mentioned at the start of the article.
So, how do we resolve the conundrum? TEVTAs and NAVTECs have a role to play. But despite government efforts, they have remained relatively small programmes. This is not surprising as these are supply-side initiatives. We have to work on the demand side as well. Similarly, asking the Chinese government or companies to train 10,000 people here and there is also going to be a small step. Setting up one skills university or two, that is able to give degrees in certain skills and areas, again very important, will also need to be part of a bigger effort to be really effective.
What is the big effort that is needed? If we want to change the narrative around skills, we need to bring skills into education in a big way. Schools are the spaces where most formal education now takes place. We need to find a way to bring skills into schools in a big way. This cannot be a small programme or restricted to just government schools (or it will simply reinforce existing perceptions about skills), it will have to be a large, society-level intervention. Say, half of all schools, public and private, would start skills programmes for their students. We have some 250,000 public and private schools across the country. So, some 125,000-odd should be a part of this programme.
What skills to offer, at what stage, to whom and what career paths to build from there, all of this and more will need to be worked out. And it will take time and effort and we will make mistakes too. But, given where we are on the skills debate, small efforts are not going to be able to bring the change we need and have been thinking about. Somebody needs to take the bull by the horns here.
Article (Opinion) Published in Dawn, April 11th, 2025
