KARACHI:
Pakistan’s youth faces a career guidance crisis that few are willing to acknowledge. From childhood, students receive no structured educational or professional guidance. They are simply pushed into a race without ever being told what they are running towards. The result is a generation chasing the same few career choices because no alternatives are ever presented to them. Most young people do not discover their true potential until it is too late.
Consider this: Pakistan produces thousands of engineering graduates every year, yet a large proportion end up unemployed or working in fields unrelated to their degrees. The market never needed that many engineers, but nobody told these students before they enrolled and sacrificed their savings. This culture of blind persistence disguised as encouragement is quietly breeding anxiety and depression across an entire generation.
Brain drain is the inevitable consequence. Our talented young people are leaving because developed countries offer better opportunities than Pakistan. Pakistan urgently needs a nationally regulated career counselling framework beginning from middle school, through which students are assessed, guided and introduced to diverse career paths before the race begins.
Shafqat Ayaz Meer
Lahore
