Human capital - challenges and opportunities

Lack of counselling, innovation has led to poor human capital development

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan, having a population of over 200 million of which 60-70% are youth, offers tremendous potential for human capital development.

Currently, the country produces a plenty of professionals at all levels ranging from graduates, post-graduates, diploma-holders and certificate-holders without any effective career planning.

Degree-awarding institutions fail to engage students in meaningful counselling and self-employment initiatives both at the time of enrolment and graduation. The sole purpose of education seems to be the production of graduates and professionals.

Owing to this, the highly-qualified graduates end up being unemployed, frustrated and socially problematic. At present, many households have highly-qualified graduates struggling to find job. Such state of affairs has far-reaching implications for the economy and society.

Public-sector organisations are wrongly considered as job-providing factories. In reality, they are established to provide an enabling environment for job creation in the market. Somehow, Pakistan is missing appropriate policies and plans for effective human capital development, although scattered and disjointed efforts are at play in a few organisations. Human capital development has never got the priority it deserves, and low professional capacity and inconsistency coupled with the disconnect among major stakeholders at the planning and implementation levels has compounded the problem.

Lack of innovation and synergies among the academia, researchers and private sector have resulted in poor human capital development.

Although politicians commit to create employment, they eventually end up adjusting a small chunk of unemployed youth in the public-sector institutions having limited openings. This has resulted in under-utilisation of the human capital which, in turn, has prevented the younger generation from playing its role in achieving tangible socio-economic progress.

Lack of policies, commitment

At the professional level, Pakistan faces several challenges including a lack of meaningful policies and strategies aimed at human capital development, weak capacity building and inconsistency in implementation. Policy formulation and implementation has not been inclusive as key stakeholders are not taken on board or consulted prior to drafting a policy.

Another dilemma at the professional level is the lack of commitment. Professionals have earned degrees but they are not exposed to practical tasks during education or early years of employment. Even professional engineers rarely get chance to practice what they had studied in university.

Research and policy linkages coupled with resource mobilisation by the private sector play a key role in every sector of the economy. However, in Pakistan, the academia and researchers are working in silos and they rarely team up with the private sector. In addition to this, a majority of the research done in the country is not driven by market demand. Thus, Pakistan is foregoing massive potential by not involving young scientists and scholars to pursue research that the market actually demands.

In developed countries, professors and senior researchers are always busy linking their studies to the market situation. Therefore, they end up attracting exorbitant investment in research from the private sector.

In the case of Pakistan, the researchers frequently demand grants from the public sector due to which renowned research institutions struggle to sustain the programmes aimed at policymaking.

The disconnect between research, private sector and policy formulation has led to the failure of policies and strategies besides missing resource mobilisation and job creation targets for the youth.

Recommendations

Solutions to these challenges lie in commitment and focus on human resources development at the political, professional and administrative levels.

Stakeholders have to be unanimous in their views and utilise various consultative tools and techniques. Objectives and output of the policy should not only be achievable but also quantifiable.

There is a need to introduce counselling at the entry and exit points of educational institutions coupled with provision of a variety of choices for post-graduate engagements, capacity building, networking, market-based job search and self-employment.

Pakistan is blessed with a massive consumer market that can absorb the available human capital in various sectors of the economy. For instance, the agriculture sector, which employs a third of the country’s population, can create even more jobs if serious efforts are made for capacity building, enterprise development and resource mobilisation.

Post-harvest value addition is a potential area to focus on not only for job creation but also for selling the produce at handsome prices.

Prime Minister Imran Khan recently announced a proposal for poverty alleviation by boosting the poultry business, which is the primary source of livelihood in rural areas.

The information technology sector, a growing area with a massive potential for employment, is also struggling under the informal sector solely due to the lack of capacity and training for enterprise development.

A minor chunk of the population, which has the resources and access to IT facilities, gets the benefit while most of the IT professionals fail to access the resources through formal tools and techniques.

Similarly, immense potential is present in the auto-repair and services sector but most of it lies in the informal area without any proper mechanism.  Although most of these skills are imparted through training at the skills development institutes, the question remains that since they lack access to the market after acquiring skills, they are most likely to struggle for a suitable job.

There is a need to connect these missing links among the stakeholders by utilising the educational and training institutions for skills development. Gaps in the system need to be identified and synergies need to be developed among various sectors aimed at devising mechanisms that help in developing and directing the human capital for placement at appropriate and deserving places under the market mechanism.

The public sector has to take the lead in developing realistic and achievable policies and strategies, and ensure their implementation by using the right platforms besides ensuring linkages and synergies among stakeholders and institutions in the public and private sectors.

THE WRITER IS A PHD IN NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT AND IS A CIVIL SERVANT

 

Published in The Express Tribune, December 9^th, 2019.

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