Daily Times

As a developing economy, Pakistan is now grappling with new challenges and emerging trends with a plethora of new types of jobs and consequently eliminating many of the traditional ways of earning bread and profits.

Leaving aside a few traditional jobs in agriculture and industry, all is about to revolutionize itself and unfortunately, we are ill-prepared for this. Neither our education sector nor the sociopolitical one is willing to take notice of and usher in new modes of education and training. The presence of ever-increasing population size is about to make its implementation even a herculean task.

The introduction of corporate and machine farming will replace much of the manual labour and will shoot up further the rising demands for skilled workers. The same is the case with the industrial and services sector where the advent of artificial intelligence and robotics is already eliminating traditional manual work.

The production and manufacturing sector will soon need to undergo a paradigm shift and the skilled worker would be more in demand than the ones whose only strength is muscular strength. This trend has been there all the time because technology and human innovation have always worked wonders to prove the diverse and evolutionary process of human life and so change has been inevitable as it was in recent and past times. The need however is to equip the future generations with the kind of skills that may keep on engaging them as useful citizens rather than the eating mouths.

Neither our education sector nor the sociopolitical one is willing to take notice of and usher in new modes of education and training.

We need therefore to immediately focus on the Skill-based short and long courses which may be future-focused and tech-oriented so that the future generations may not become irrelevant in the new technological revolutions. While graduate and undergraduate courses may be of much efficiency and relevancy, it takes a long time to equip the learner with the necessary resources to deal with the world, the short courses can be of much help to the early starters who experience financial constraints and need work.

The fast and emerging technologies are making it possible to not only work from home but also to establish little labs and training spaces to train and teach skills to our people on war footing. This is not only a cheaper mode of education but also much less time-consuming for the ones who need jobs than the education for white-collar professions. Looking at most of the population of Pakistan, we need this type of education to be in line with the emerging new modes of production, manufacturing and services sectors to run the economy. The long-term courses and higher education may be left for the ones who can afford time and money.

The Chinese model has employed each individual for some useful work in the job market economy where one or the other jobs may be adopted. This is the only way to maintain the bulging population of Pakistan and make Pakistan stand in the world’s competitive environment.

The agriculture sector is in dire need of skilled workers in the area of seeding/sowing, harvesting and storage facilities. Much of the food is either wasted or its quality is damaged beyond repair. Corporate farming is introducing machine-induced labour as a future vision of agriculture.

Pakistan being an agricultural country has a very vast potential to be tapped and harnessed effectively. The traditional setup is not going to hold long. So the education sector must reform itself and it may come up with better implementable practices for making its product useful fit in the upcoming techno-agri revolution in Pakistan.

The second major sector of employment and work is education and health. In the case of education, the innovation of artificial intelligence is fast emerging to replace the traditional teacher and his, gradually becoming obsolete, modes of teaching. The information and knowledge are at the fingertips of all. So, we need to produce a teacher who has the skill to make efficient use of emerging technology and become more productive, creative and original than ever.

The health sector is experiencing the entry of robotic doctors and the online prescription and diagnosis of ills of humanity which would again minimize the role of traditional clinics. It would require more technologically advanced workers rather than just the capacity to insert a syringe.

The transport and telecommunication sector is already experiencing the thrust of artificial intelligence and automation. Electric cars are going to do away with the fossil fuel-based mobility and so will demand more of the electrical and computing engineering than the traditional mechanic and engineers. In the case of communication also, the multiple ways of communication have brought us to a stage where the easiest and most effective ways of communication have entered our world to cause a further revolution. But all these need equally skilled and efficient workers.

All and many more are demanding that we overhaul all our systems of teaching to be more in line with the new realities of the world.

The writer is a professor of English at Government Emerson University, Multan. He can be reached at zeadogar@hotmail.com and Tweets at @Profzee