KARACHI: In order to facilitate students, faculty and researcher in areas of job acquisition and hunting, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) has decided to develop a job portal for academia and industry using HEC platform. In this connection, the HEC has invited Expression of Interest (EoI) for development of job portal. HEC intends to acquire services of market leading career service provider to develop job portal not only providing latest opportunities and career counseling services but also run the analytics to craft the education policy in consultation with domain expert in HEI’s as per need. According to EoI documents, HEC intends to explore potential capability gaps in which jobs must be advertised and to build a case for such areas to be pursued by the higher education institutes and government. “This will help the applicants to find the suitable position for particular opportunity within and outside the country using various choices and parameters and helps providing many choices to companies in finding the ideal candidates with right qualification and skills,” it added. It is pertinent to mention that HEC was a government institution of Pakistan responsible for funding, overseeing, regulating and accrediting higher education efforts in Pakistan. The HEC, in the EoI documents, said that over the last decade supranational organisations such as the OECD, the World Bank, the European Union and the International Labour Organization (ILO) had emphasised the importance of career guidance, particularly in terms of achieving the goals like lifelong, labour market outcomes, social equity and social inclusion. Not only do they identify attention to career guidance as one of the issues involved in the initial transition from school to work but also as an issue to be addressed on a lifelong basis. Consequently, no formal initiatives have been implemented to strengthen research, collaboration and networking in order to promote a common understanding of career guidance at both the national and international level, HEC added. HEC, by developing this job portal, claimed that it had taken first step that would help in building a partnership between industry, academia and government to facilitate faculty, students and researcher. This will lead postgraduate students, junior research staff, and other professionals to use this job portal to make well-informed choices about their future working lives and to translate these effectively into appropriate decisions and actions. This will result in maintain and develop links with the range of organizations providing appropriate opportunities. According to HEC, job portal would give the ability to the users understand and develop the necessary skills to equip them for whatever career path they choose. HEC also wants to promote the exchange of ideas between members of the higher education institutes and representatives of other medium and large enterprise organizations on matters affecting the employment of graduate members of the academia, and to provide expert advice and information on career issues. Recently, after several protests staged by young PhD Doctors Association (YPDA) against their unemployment, HEC had established an e-portal in order to collect basic information. The e-portal was launched in August 2018. Published in Daily Times, December 12th 2018.