Prime Minister Khan and his team may talk about creating jobs but as a recent study demonstrates, Pakistan’s problem is that it ranks at the bottom of the skills ladder. According to the inaugural edition of Coursera Global Skills Index 2019, one of the world’s largest skills data bases, Pakistan ranks at the bottom of the world’s top trending skills in Business, Technology and Data Science.
Of the 60 countries “benchmarked in the GSI 2019, Pakistan ranks 57 or close to the last in the domain of business. It does worse in Technology and Data Science domains ranking at 59, only a notch above Nigeria that sits at the bottom of the index. European countries are the global skills leader as per the index and feature in the top quartile (cutting-edge) but less advanced economies such as Pakistan feature as less-skilled and hug the bottom quartile (lagging) across the three skills domain.”
In Business, “Pakistan is at 5th percentile while in Technology and Data Science it sits even below at 2nd percentile – a country close to 100 percentile is at the top and one close to 0 percentile is at the bottom of the list.
“Asia Pacific is at the extremes of the global Business rankings with New Zealand (#6) and Australia (#9) approaching the very top, while Pakistan (#57) and Bangladesh (#59) land at the bottom.” (For details see page 5 of the report)
Also, “Pakistan’s global ranking is 57, in the bottom 5 percentile, for Business skills.” (for details please see page 9 of the report)
Further, “Pakistan’s global ranking is 59, in the bottom 2 percentile, for Technology.” (for details please see page 11 of the report)
Also, “Pakistan’s global ranking is 59, in the bottom 2 percentile, for Data Science.” (for details please see page 13 of the report)
According to a news story on the report “At the top, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore rank well above the global average across Business, Technology, and Data Science. At the bottom, Bangladesh and Pakistan rank close to last globally in each of the domains,” it says. Referring to the countries close to the bottom, the report says “these countries spend less on education as a percentage of GDP and have higher proportions of low-skilled workers”. The GSI report comes at a time when the Fourth Industrial Revolution of automation and artificial intelligence is transforming the world of work.”
Finally, “With technology advancing faster than humans can adapt, the skills required to do most jobs are evolving quickly—a real challenge to the careers, companies, and countries that are fueled by them,” the report says. In order to keep pace with this change, it adds governments and businesses must develop their workforces to build, manage, and leverage new technologies.”
