STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Editors Note: Dr. Tauseef Aized is a professor at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore and a research fellow at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

With the advent of the industrial revolution, the traditional role of higher learning institutions has been transformed from simply educating young people to creating and disseminating knowledge to the whole society. Every higher education institution needs enormous financial resources that, in our system, are typically provided through public funding. The state demands a return on its investment beyond traditional manpower development. Read the rest of this entry »

The vast majority of Pakistanis using the web are familiar only with English keyboards. Creating content in Urdu script is a slow and frustrating experience, as it requires either learning the Urdu keyboard layout, which is forced onto a keyboard designed for writing English, or using on-screen keyboards, which are useful but limited by the speed at which one can click the mouse. As a result, producing online content in Urdu script has mostly been limited to a small number of bloggers and commercial websites. For most users, writing Urdu using Roman script (transliteration) has become the main way of writing Urdu on computers. Transliteration is a technique that is used to do phonetic mapping of words written in one script (e.g. Arabic) to another script (e.g. Roman). For example, شکریہ transliterates into shukriya. While using Roman transliteration may be adequate for a lot of purposes (chatting), it leaves a lot to be desired from the perspective of people who prefer to read and write the language in its original script.

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Yesterday, The News International ran a four page special on ROZEE.PK,  Pakistan’s (self-proclaimed) #1 job website. Their Campus Career Portal Initiative, a project started by ROZEE.PK to link the academia and the industry in Pakistan, in particular caught my eye. This project is being funded by the National ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) R&D Fund under the Ministry of Information Technology. The proposal for this project introduces the project as follows (the complete proposal is available here):

“The Campus Career Portal Initiative proposes an efficient, scalable, and distributed system of matching students, academia and industry to achieve industry-funded research projects and industry demand recruitment. It will also generate invaluable statistics, and effectively match graduates within their respective industries with pinpoint accuracy.”

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A vast majority of graduates from Pakistani industry goes on to serve the local industry. Right from the day of the first interview, many of them are presented with the reality that their four years of undergraduate learning does not help with the prospective job responsibilities. After landing a job, they have to learn the ropes by going through orientation and probation periods while earning meager salaries. Only after this, often humbling experience, are they transformed into a practicing professional and able to get promotions or avail employment opportunities elsewhere with higher salaries or better job description. The industry is not happy with the curriculum being taught at the academic institutes, and about the lack of proper career counseling to students which would encourage them to have a more stable career path. The academia blames the professionals for not coming forward to contribute in teaching. They also bring up the lack of industry support in  providing internships and senior project supports which could minimize the need of post-graduate training during the orientation/probation periods and allow students to be ready to take the real-world challenges from the day of graduation. Both parties have a valid argument but these discussions are mostly limited at pointing out the other party’s faults, instead of finding out solutions and identifying action items for each party.

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