TANVEER AHMED

KARACHI: Federal government has planned to train at least 10,000 Information Technology (IT) professionals in 12 to 15 emerging technologies to resolve the shortage of skilled human resources in these technologies.

In IT sector, more than dozen new technologies have emerged like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing, Bio Date etc, in which the country faces the dearth of skilled manpower.

For training of this skilled manpower in these technologies, the government has approved a project titled “High Impact Skills Boot Camp” at the cost of Rs338.522 million.

According to a working paper of the project, the government has allocated Rs100 million in Public Sector Development Programme (PSDP) for the next financial year 2019-20.

According to official documents, it has been highlighted in many reports concerning the IT industry of Pakistan that it faces shortage of skilled human resource at middle level of management who can act as project managers, team leaders and project coordinators etc.

In view of this situation, the government has planned to train at least 10,000 IT professionals in 12 to 15 emerging technologies such as AI, Cloud Computing, Bio Data etc.

According to scope of the project, it has immense direct and indirect economic benefits and the project will result in improved quality of work. A country’s economy becomes more productive as the proportion of skilled workers increases since skilled workers can more efficiently carry out work with strong technical foundation and problem solving aptitude.

The details of the project showed that most universities have been unable to timely update curriculum or mobilize resources to cope up with rapid demand of certain critical new technologies like Cloud Computing, Data Sciences including Artificial Intelligence.

A delegation of distinguished and successful entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley was invited by President Dr Arif AIvi some time back for presenting some concrete recommendations for scaling up government’s efforts to uplift knowledge & skills base eventual benefits of such skills development will result in export of high value services required by demanding markets like USA.

It is mentioned in the PC-I that three universities in Karachi will undertake the pilot project in which first batch of 200 students

would be trained while similar batches will be rolled out in Lahore, Islamabad and other cities after this pilot project.