K-P swamped by response to job ad

Provincial govt advertised positions for thousands of teachers for elementary, secondary schools in the province

PESHAWAR: As the provincial government advertised positions for thousands of teachers for elementary and secondary schools in the province, it was not expecting to spend time trawling through hundreds of thousands of applications. On December 17, 2017, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Department advertised 17,000 positions for subject specialists and district cadres including CT, drawing master (DM), PET, TT, AT, qaris and primary school teachers (PST). In return, the department was swamped by around 700,000 responses. According to K-P Elementary and Secondary Education data, as many as 113,954 people applied through the National Testing Services (NTS) — the preferred ‘merit filter’ of the provincial government — for the post of SST.

Of these, 88,563 applications were considered to be eligible while 25,391 applications were rejected due to different reasons. Documents available with The Express Tribune show that the department had attracted  a large number of applicants who had completed their post-graduate degrees with 21 of the applicants holding a doctorate in philosophy (PhDs), 4,951 had Masters in Philosophy (MPhil), while a staggering 66,932 applicants had a masters degree. On the other hand, graduates did not seem as keen to apply for the post with 9,989 applicants holding a Bachelors of Arts degree, while a further 6,670 had a Bachelors of Science degree.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 22^nd, 2018.