Aitizaz Hassan

ISLAMABAD, August 2 (INP-WealthPK): The Ministry of Planning Development and Special Initiatives has decided to constitute joint academia-industry working groups to devise a future course of action, assign responsibilities and set timeframes for completion of various tasks and projects to ensure an all-inclusive development of the information technology (IT) sector.

The ministry said that the joint working groups would enable the industry and IT professionals to keep abreast of the latest trends and developments in the sector, and prepare the country’s youth for a digital revolution.

Speaking to IT experts from academia, industry and government organisations during a meeting held recently, Minister of Planning and Development Ahsan Iqbal said the country needed to ensure that the digital workforce was problem solver.

He emphasised that the Pakistani youth needed to be motivated to identify the problems of their respective fields and trained to solve them. He underlined that the universities needed to not only impart education but also inculcate skills to students to enable them to learn latest techniques, be well-groomed, and have best entrepreneurial and communication skills to be readily employable.

Highlighting the importance of making progress on the IT frontiers for the country’s prosperity, minister Ahsan Iqbal said that there was a need for uninterrupted execution of plans and policies. He stated that no country could make progress unless it witnessed political stability and continuity of policies. He stressed the need for frequently organising such sessions and bringing together the academia and industry.

Chief executive officers, heads and representative of major IT enterprises expressed their views on the gaps, challenges and opportunities in the IT and computer science (CS) sectors in Pakistan.

The participants were informed that the computing sciences curricula was in line with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) standards. They were informed that the Higher Education Commission and the ministry of IT had started negotiations to enable Pakistan to sign Seoul Accord on Computing Education. They also learned that the Pakistani higher education institutions produced 50,000 IT graduates every year.

The speakers during the recently-held meeting stressed the need for making the final year projects (FYPs) of computing sciences more productive by linking them with the real-world industry problems instead of picking up theoretical and hypothetical ideas. They proposed developing a web portal or setting up a platform for enlisting support of IT industry to help allocate students’ FYPs within their set-ups, so employable graduates could be made readily available to industry.

Meanwhile, talking to WealthPK, the head of China Study Centre at the Comsats University, Islamabad, Dr. Tahir Mumtaz Awan said that strengthening industry-academia linkage was need of the time. “It is to ensure the readiness of industry to build capacity of university graduates in IT and CS disciplines.”

He also called for making the Higher Education Commission and National Computing Education and Accreditation Council regulations more effective and promoting applied research. He said the students should be given industry exposure early in their graduation and FYPs so their degrees could help them solve the industry problems.

Credits: Independent News Pakistan—Wealthpk