The best way to do that is to establish linkage between industries and universities, they said calling for setting up endowment by industries for funding of specialized courses to cater to their manpower need. A National daily dwelt with the issue in a report on Thursday at a time when the government is working on the new budget for 2017-18. They emphasized on increased allocation to education sector and for training to create manpower for industries reversing its declining share in overall National Budget in recent years. Moreover they called for restructuring of the academic curriculum for creating skilled manpower instead of bringing out aimless graduates.
The country saw mushrooming of universities in recent years but public universities are mainly lacking dynamic leadership for remodelling academic courses to meet manpower need for rapidly growing service sector as well as for big industries. On the other hand, private universities are using the facilities as business for making fortune offering high cost courses that lacks quality education to create manpower for business.
As a result our industries and service sector are hiring skilled manpower – both as workforce as well as at managerial level at high cost from abroad while our younger generation is languishing from large-scale unemployment. The presence of huge number of Indian professionals in our business sector is quite noticeable now alongwith Chinese, Taiwanese and Koreans particularly in garments and telecom industries. Statistics show over 47 percent of our graduates are unemployed while foreigners are overtaking the job market.
Experts have rightly suggested that our universities and industrial sector should have close collaboration to meet the growing demand of professionals. Industries must come forward to help create the kind of manpower that they want instead of blindly depending on traditional education.
Capacity development of managerial professionals is very much related to increase productivity in industries which in turn reduce cost of business to make it more competitive. A study report shows one percent increase in management quality is equivalent of 65 percent increase in capital or 25 percent increase in labour force. So there can’t be any other way that business can benefit from investing in developing skilled workers and managerial persons. In our view it is also more important to achieving the SDG targets for Bangladesh to become a developing nation by 2030.
