Despite the provincial government’s special focus on technical and vocational training, 61 percent TEVTA graduates remain without job due to insufficient, irrelevant and obsolete training infrastructure.
These observations were made in a recent research, ‘Baseline Survey: Labour Market Outcomes of Punjab TEVTA Graduates’, conducted by the World Bank. Survey results indicated that excluding the group of graduates in further studies, the employment percentage was 39 percent while 61 percent remain without job and almost all of them were looking for employment.
The study finds out that 28 percent of respondents were engaged in further education. It points out that as expected employment outcomes differ across trades, districts, gender and schools. Among other things, this variation indicated that training was substantially better linked to labour market demand in some schools, trades and districts, the survey adds.
The research highlighted that the Punjab government had awarded high priority to the development technical and educational training. It has boasted 456 technical education and vocational training public institutions in the province. However, these institutions face a number of important challenges, notably relevance of training was reportedly low, training opportunities for youth were few, investments were few and far in-between, infrastructure was increasingly becoming out-dated and the accountability for results could be increased, the survey indicates.
The study recognised that though the province had taken several initiatives to address some of these shortcomings, but the most significant being re-organisation of the sector by providing autonomy to the Punjab Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority (P-TEVTA) and giving it administrative authority over all TVET related public activity in the province. However, the findings of the survey recommended a strong need for the improvement of quality and relevance of technical education and vocational training.
The survey revealed that the employment rate was the highest for those with an Electrical Diploma of Associate Engineering (DAE) at 51 percent, followed by Civil DAE (50 percent) and Welder (43 percent). The employment rate was highest for those graduates from Lodhran district (67 percent), followed by Bhakkar (54 percent) and Bahawalpur (51 percent). The male employment rate was over 12 percentage points higher than the female employment rate (41 percent versus 29 for females).
The study showed that over 60 percent of employed respondents worked between 20-40 hours every week. Seventy-seven percent of graduates earned less than Rs 10,000. The mean income reported was approximately Rs7,600. More than fifty-five percent of graduates reported that their job was in the same field as their training.
The findings suggested that more needed to be done to improve the employment outcomes of trainees and meeting industry demand for skilled labour. A key step for the government and Punjab TEVTA was to increase employability of graduates through improvement in the labour market relevance and quality of training and as a second step continuously measure the employability of graduates to see if the improvement raises employability, the report said.
One doesn’t simply get a job after a degree
