Pakistan is lacking in having an adequately trained and skilled workforce in production sector which ultimately resulted in lowest exports and consequently limited potential for economic growth. At the same time, Pakistan has a severe shortage of high-quality manpower, as evidenced from the fact that it educates approximately the same number of engineers per annum as Austria, a country 1/20th its size in terms of population.

Until recently Pakistan’s engineering universities focused almost exclusively on undergraduate education, providing no specialist courses to address problems such as energy and water shortage, poor urban planning, an inadequate transport system, out-of-date mineral processing techniques, and lack of mechanization. The situation has undergone some improvement in recent years; however, a very significantly enhanced effort is still needed to enable Pakistan to realize its true potential and to reach equivalence with the standards of industrially-developed nations.