Yesterday, The News International ran a four page special on ROZEE.PK, Pakistan’s (self-proclaimed) #1 job website. Their Campus Career Portal Initiative, a project started by ROZEE.PK to link the academia and the industry in Pakistan, in particular caught my eye. This project is being funded by the National ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) R&D Fund under the Ministry of Information Technology. The proposal for this project introduces the project as follows (the complete proposal is available here):
“The Campus Career Portal Initiative proposes an efficient, scalable, and distributed system of matching students, academia and industry to achieve industry-funded research projects and industry demand recruitment. It will also generate invaluable statistics, and effectively match graduates within their respective industries with pinpoint accuracy.”
Currently, 85 universities are involved in the project, including all the major business and engineering institutions like LUMS, IBA, GIKI and FAST. So it seems like the the government have taken note of the industry-academia gap and are taking positive steps to address the problem. So far so good.
But when you take a closer look at the project things start to look slightly less rosy. The first thing that struck me was the funding granted to this project. According to the National ICT R&D Fund’s website 12.19 million rupees were given to Naseeb Online Services (Pvt) Ltd (the parent company of ROZEE.PK) to carry out this initiative, which seems like a lot for basically developing an interactive website. These must be some awesome portals.
Which leads to the second disappointment. The portals seem to have little more than the content already available on ROZEE.PK. Looking at the NUST Portal, you’ll see a list of available vacancies which are the same as the ones shown on ROZEE.PK’s homepage and the same as the ones shown on other portals. No screening seems to be done at all. The rest of the page shows some logos of “featured employers” which I can only assume are of companies who have hired from this institution before and a calendar. Other links include the Student, Alumni, and Employer Corners which again allow students to make profiles of themselves and employers to search through these profiles (something ROZEE.PK was already doing).
Although I appreciate the effort and recognize the need of industry-academia interaction, is this really the best way to go? Give 12.19 million rupees to a company to basically tweak its own website and put a University’s name at the top? The original proposal for the project lists the following academic objectives of the project:
(i) produce higher quality graduates who would have amassed practical training gained through industry internships advertised on their university’s portal,
(ii) better align faculty research with industry needs,
(iii) attract additional skilled graduates to join university faculty due to increased research funding from industry,
(iv) perform analytics to better identify education gaps and improvement areas.
Only the first objective seems relevant to the portals created, but since ROZEE.PK was performing this job anyway I don’t see how a portal is of any use. No mention of research is made on the portals I visited (except LUMS which has “Research Papers” link pointing to an empty page) and unless there are some special pages that are not visible to the general public, I don’t see how the industry and faculty are “aligning” through these portals (again only LUMS has a faculty corner). And with regards to the last point, wouldn’t it have been easier to just ask the participating universities and companies to email them these statistics?
In conclusion, while I think the idea is a good one, it does not justify the funding granted to it. Surely, the Ministry of Information Technology can look past the flashy websites and see that the project is not as revolutionizing as it claims to be. Or am I missing something?
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