LAHORE: A report has revealed that 93.2 per cent of the youths who received training on quality demand-driven skills during the last three years under “Hunarmand Nojawan Project” are still unemployed.

The Punjab government had launched the project to empower 94,700 youths with a new focus on quality demand-driven skills and increase the training facility for young graduates from 90,000 per annum graduates to 157,000 through introducing second shift in Tevta institutes to boost economic/productive efficiency.

The Directorate General Monitoring and Evaluation Planning and Development Board had conducted monitoring of the project for three main purposes – assessing the performance of a programme or project, analysing organisational performance and examining features and processes in the environment of an organisation or scheme.

According to a report available with Dawn, as many as 93.2 per cent trainees are unemployed, 5.3pc doing part-time jobs and only 1.6pc have full-time jobs. The 56.3pc students belong to the age group of the 16-21 years, 1.1pc to 16 and below, 30.3pc to 21-25 years and 8pc to 25-30.

Reports claims 93.2pc of trained youths remain jobless

The monitoring team questioned how could a trainee belonging to the age group of 18 and below get a job when the fact is that he or she did not own ID card and was unable to work as per labour laws while 60.7pc completed matriculation, 24.4pc intermediate, 7.2pc bachelors, and 3.2pc masters.

As many as 98.8pc trainees

were not charged any admission and monthly fee by the institutions and 95pc did a single course and five per cent did two courses under the project. Around 98.7pc trainees were satisfied with the facilities and quality of education, 7. 96pc trainees ranked the course content updated and 5.2pc were not given the updated course.

The report further stated that 73.3pc trainees were unskilled before taking the course while 16.1pc were semi-skilled and 2.3pc were fully skilled before taking the admission, 73.3pc had completed full training, 25.1pc semi-skilled and 1.6pc unskilled at the time of the visit.

The monitoring team also observed that the detail of year wise allocation, releases and utilisation of the funds and the administrative approval, PC-1 of the project was not shared and outdated instruments were provided to the trainees for the training.

The MS-IT trainees were not given sufficient duration considering the content of the course and the course was not offered in English and Urdu, the web designing trainees suffered interrupted internet connection and mobile repairing course was only being taught of hardware related issues of cell phone and the content regarding the software issue was not included in the training course.

The report further stated that in mobile phone repairing course only training of android cell phones was being provided to the trainees and the content regarding the IOS (apple) was not included in the training course, the electrician course trainees were not being trained for UPS fitting and Solar system, HVAC course were not being trained for inverter units related issues, and quality of training was compromised.

The trainees of AUTOCAD course suggested that updated software should be included to get benefit from this course, MOU’s should be signed for better growth and placement opportunities for trainees, tool kits should be provided after course, an internship program in respective traded to support the trainings, MOUs with different industries should be signed for conducting the field awareness which consists of one to three days and three phase metering training should be included in electrician course.

Tevta Director General Ops 2 retired Col Rao Rashid claimed that 54pc of the youngsters had been employed and they would release an updated data in June. He said the official report was prepared some time ago.

Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2022