ISLAMABAD – Federal Minister for Education and Professional Training Shafqat Mahmood on Friday inaugurated the NAVTTC Centre of Excellence in Modern Technologies at National Vocational and Technical Training Commission, Islamabad.
The centre has been established by National Vocational and Technical Training Commission with the cooperation of GIZ, the European Union, Norway and Germany.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, the minister emphasised the need for more centres of excellence (COE) which would provide state of the art cutting edge technology training to the youth, a high demand skill nationally and internationally. The NAVTTC has established COE Islamabad with multiple labs in modern technologies through donors, for mechatronics, IT and CNC lab, he added.
The minister said the government gave top priority to the TVET sector and had provided Rs.10 billion under NAVTTC’s Prime Minister’s Skills for All – Kamyab Jawan Program, which was the flagship program of the government for providing income-generating Hi-TECH skills to youth.
The government gave a high priority to skill training especially in hi tech like artificial intelligence, robotics, cyber security etc, he said. The government had given NAVTTC the target to produce one million skilled youth workforce, and availability of such big skilled labour would have a massive improvement in the jobs market and industry.
The government was focusing on the reforms in TVET sector to bring the technical and vocational training in line with the requirements of the marketplace, to prepare the workforce with accreditation from international bodies.
Chairman NAVTTC Syed Javed Hasan shared that NAVTTC was working hand in hand with the training partners for enhancing quality of the TVET sector. NAVTTC had so far successfully trained 74,736 youth in 150 High-TECH and 100 conventional technologies with 71 per cent employment.
Another batch of 63,000 youth was being provided with skill trainings through 989 training partners and reputed universities, of which 95 per cent youth had expressed satisfaction over the quality of the training by NAVTTC, he informed. He mentioned that the Skills for All Strategy of the government was working as a catalyst for imparting quality training among youth.
Executive Director NAVTTC Sajid Baloch assured that NAVTTC was fully committed to providing quality trainings and thanked the donors the EU, Germany and Norway for their valuable support to Pakistan.
The minister appreciated the efforts of NAVTTC team for accomplishing the task of establishment of CoE in Modern Technologies.
NAVTTC COE Islamabad would be a center for training of chief master trainers and master trainers, who would train a large number of youth in modern employable technologies, he remarked.
This would pave the way towards allowing the Pakistani TVET system to sustainably improve delivery of training and assessment, career counselling and job placement, he said.
The story originally appeared in The Nation
