Pathetic State of Engineering Education and its Comparison with Techl Edu

[areej]

Pathetic state of Engineering education and its comparison with Technical Education in Pakistan

Technical education in Pakistan is at infancy stage presently. However there are number of Higher education universities in the mega cities like Karachi, Lahore and the Capital Islamabad. This results in creation of human resource for middle management position which moves upwards. For example take the Mechanical Engineering Departments. They regularly churn out Mechanical Engineers which lack sufficient skills to even carry out simple task like detail designing and fabrication. So the junior engineers will end up asking the lower staff or labour as high management has no clue what mechanical engineering is as they are MBAs and Chartered Accountants.

But the question arises is who is training the skill labour in our country. Let’s say for example labourer is a diploma holder or (DAE mechanical or DAE Electrical) holder in our case and moves towards lower management or shop floor in charge position later in his career. There are several technical institutes and colleges who take only fees and do not teach or train student as they are charging merely couple of hundred rupees which is not sufficient to buy neither the equipment nor the man power to train the individuals.

Moreover the provincial government has established Technical Boards and TEVTs. For example if you take Sindh, it has Sindh had Sindh board of Technical Education (SBTE) and STEVTA (Sindh Technical Education and Vocational Training Authority). These institution are established and get funding from the EU, GIZ and UN. But if you look at their curriculum they are decades old and the curriculum revision committees decline to update them.

I believe that technical education is very important for the economic growth of any country. This result is mass technical human recourse creation which leads to economic prosperity. Currently India is leading technical resource creator in the region and the technical education will be 9 Billion USD in few years only in India.

Areej Noor is a Director Training and Media relations at Royal Institute of science and Technology (http://rist.edu.pk), which is a leading Technical Education institute for Diploma courses in Karachi. Institute offers DAE Mechanical http://rist.edu.pk/dae-mechanical/ and other DAE Courses in Karachi. She has done her MSc from the University of Leicester, UK in Education Management and worked at several multinational organizations.