Planning Commission Approves Rs 2.7 Billion to Train 100,000 IT Experts

The government has approved Rs 2.7 billion to train 100,000 professionals to create Pakistan’s global IT workforce.

In the past decade, the demand for IT professionals has been increasing and India, along with other countries, took the most out of it. India, in a short time, became an IT hub for multinational companies looking for a competent IT workforce.

Pakistan missed out on the opportunity at that time, however, The Planning Commission says Pakistan will not ignore the chance to become a global player in the IT market this time.

The Project

The project will be launched under the Federal Public Sector Development Program (PSDP). The government will subsidize 90% of the cost to train and certify Information Technology professionals.

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Roughly, the program will follow these steps;

• The government will subsidize the cost of training and certification of high in-demand courses.
• Global tech leaders like IBM, Amazon, Oracle etc. will be invited to Pakistan to train students for 4-6 months in selected universities.
• Certified trainers and professionals will train these students in the institutions.
• A test will be conducted to select the best candidates that will be eligible for the 90% subsidy.

Classes Schedule: During weekdays – Monday to Friday – classes will be held from 6 pm to 9 pm. During the weekends-Saturday and Sunday-classes will be held from 9 am to 6 pm.

Pilot Project

Higher Education Commission (HEC) has already invited applications for several fields including;

• Data Analytics,
• Artificial Intelligence,
• Cybersecurity,
• eCommerce,
• Business Intelligence,
• Cloud,
• Enterprise Resource Planning, and
• Open Source Software.

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Initially, as part of the pilot project, 25,000 applicants will be trained in three years. The project is expected to launch in next few months and classes will hopefully start in July-August 2018.

Talking about the program, Executive Director of HEC Dr. Arshad Ali said;

I see this programme as a kind of finishing school for young graduates who may learn a lot of theory in the classroom but will get an opportunity to put all of this to test through a rigorous 4-6 month programme that puts the finishing touches on classroom learning and leave with a valuable specialisation and a global certification with them.

Benefits of the Project

The trained and certified professionals will be able to migrate to other countries and improve Pakistan’s image. Pakistan is looking to lead as the global IT workforce in the 21st century with this project.

Apart from that, it will benefit the local industry as well. Pakistan has failed to develop its own IT industry due to the lack of professional IT experts. CEO of Arbisoft Pvt Ltd, Yasser Bashir, told;

If we have access to the kind of certified professionals targeted in this project, Pakistani software companies could better target high-end export market and compete with the Indians and Russians of this world.

The project will further attract global IT firms to invest more in Pakistan as the IT workforce of the country increases.

Via Innovate PK