By Ali Imran
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 center has been established by National Vocational and Technical Training Commission (NAVTTC) with the cooperation of GIZ, European Union, Norway and Germany.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, the minister emphasized the need for more Centres of Excellence (COE) which would provide state of the art cutting edge technology trainings to the youth, a high demand skill nationally and internationally.
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 a 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 trainings 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 percent employment.
Another batch of 63,000 youth were being provided skill trainings through 989 training partners and reputed universities. 95 percent youth had expressed satisfaction over the quality of the trainings by NAVTTC, he informed.
He mentioned that 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 provide 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.
