A recent survey conducted by Gallup Pakistan found out that top notch IT companies in Pakistan employ only 10% of IT graduates from Pakistan’s universities, whereas, software houses employ 50% of these graduates. This trend shows that foreign graduates are preferred in high-value products company which identifies the gap among local and foreign universities. It highlights areas of improvement for the IT universities and colleges across the country.
Some of the basic skills which are identified as loopholes in the fresh graduates are weak English, Communication skills and technical skills. Pakistani universities produce 25,000 graduates annually but only 5,000 of them are employed in the same year. Some of the companies have also their concerns regarding the outdated syllabus for which Ministry of IT and Telecommunication is planning to revamp the curriculum of computer sciences education.
However, the revamping the educational syllabi is not an easy task at all as provinces are not agreed with one another. HEC along with Education Ministry also have to plan on a same plan because it is being monitored by both the bodies. In addition to that, academia industry linkages need to be well established because IT industry needs to communicate the required skillset to universities. In these times of crisis, one needs to take help from the online courses available, such as, EdX which provides courses from internationally recognized universities.
One of the astonishing facts is that this ratio changes when graduates are filtered from the top universities of Pakistan. Gallup Survey suggested that graduates of top 6 universities in Pakistan are highly employable but they find foreign avenues or possibly land in getting jobs in multinational companies (MNCs).
