Engr. Muhammad Abbas Sajid has been hiring engineers for over forty years. In every interview, he asks the same questions, not about thermodynamics or fluid mechanics, but simpler things. Can you read a site drawing? Can you talk to a client? What went wrong on a job, and what did you do about it?
In four decades, he has rarely been impressed by the answers.
Sajid is the founder and CEO of Engineering Services Pvt. Ltd., one of Pakistan’s leading MEP contracting firms, established in 1984. He also serves on the Industrial Advisory Board of NED University of Engineering and Technology. He has spent years trying to close the distance between Pakistan’s universities and its industries. That distance, he says, keeps growing.
“The readiness gap has unfortunately widened over the past decade,” he said. “While students today are more technologically aware, many lack practical engineering experience, communication skills, and the ability to solve problems in real-world situations.”
The numbers support his concern. A 2024 review by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics found that over 31 per cent of young graduates remain unemployed, with postgraduate degree-holders among the most affected. A February 2026 report revealed that 64 per cent of graduates face employment difficulties specifically because of skill gaps. Pakistan spends just 1.9 per cent of its GDP on education which is one of the lowest rates in the region when nearly 800,000 university graduates enter a job market that did not ask for the skills they were taught.
Inside Pakistan’s pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, the picture is just as stark. Mohammad Hameed Khan, Head of Engineering and Products at a leading pharmaceutical facility, says the three things fresh graduates most consistently cannot do, have nothing to do with academic performance. The first is practical troubleshooting known as diagnosing real problems in live machinery, not idealised textbook scenarios. The second is technical communication (writing a clear report, or explaining a technical issue to someone outside engineering). The third is the most dangerous: applying safety protocols rigorously in a live facility. “They may know the theory,” he said, “but knowing and doing are two very different things on a production floor.”
The most common costly error Hameed Khan has witnessed is miscalibration of equipment, a mistake that can halt production entirely or damage expensive machinery. The gap behind it is almost always the same. “They haven’t practised enough with actual industrial tools,” he said. “They underestimate tolerances. They overlook small details. These are things you only learn by doing.” His prescription is concrete which is to replace theoretical coursework with project-based learning tied to real industrial problems. He pointed to NUTECH Islamabad as a working model, a university built around applied engineering and close industry collaboration. “This approach,” he said, “could be a blueprint.”
The problem is not limited to one sector. Aqeel Mohsin, Head of Engineering at one of Pakistan’s textile manufacturing firms, has been running Management Trainee Officer programmes since 2003. Every fresh graduate who joins goes through six to seven months of supervised training before being trusted with independent responsibility. Ten months, in some cases. That is not exceptional generosity. That is the minimum required to make a university graduate functional on his floor.
“It is not just the textile sector,” Mohsin said. “In every sector, universities are not preparing students for practical work. The curriculum is not designed for this. It is not focused towards the application of knowledge for engineering work.”
The reason, he argued, begins not with students but with teachers. “The teachers are not exposed to such practical work, so they are not knowledgeable about it and do not know how to cover that up.” A professor who has never calibrated industrial equipment cannot teach a student how to do it. A lecturer who has never written a standard operating procedure cannot explain why documentation matters on a live production line. “Teachers themselves are not properly educated on such practical work,” Mohsin said, “and so they are unable to teach the students properly.”
His solution is straightforward: train the teachers first. Give faculty real industry exposure. Have them teach from case studies, from real instruments, from situations that mirror actual engineering environments. “This is how we will be able to build trust in fresh graduates,” he said, “knowing that they were taught well and have proper exposure to practical work since university.”
But not everybody is worried. Some engineers who’ve been through the system themselves see things a little differently.
Agha Shuja is a chemical engineer who completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has worked at Merck in Wisconsin, where he managed a technology transfer portfolio worth over $15 million, and at Moderna in Oxford, where he was part of the team that produced the first batch of the COVID-19 vaccine in the United Kingdom. He now works at the Dow Institute of Life Sciences in Karachi, contributing to efforts to localise vaccine manufacturing in Pakistan.
He has seen graduate readiness from both sides of the hiring table. His view is in one important way, more hopeful.
“Fresh graduates think engineering is about solving equations,” he said. “It’s really about solving problems with and through people.”
Where Sajid sees a widening gap, Shuja sees one beginning to close, not because universities have improved, but because technology has changed how young engineers learn. “Five years ago, a fresh graduate would spend months digging through journals just to get up to speed,” he said. “Now they can get answers in seconds through AI tools.” The bottleneck has shifted. It is no longer access to information. It is the ability to turn that information into action quickly.
He is also more reluctant to blame the graduate when things go wrong. At Merck, he underwent three months of dedicated training before he could enter the core facility. “When fresh graduates make mistakes, it is more often than not that the company did not train them properly,” he said. “The first question should not be: what is wrong with them? It should be: what is wrong with our onboarding?”
The regulators are starting to catch up, but slowly. The Pakistan Engineering Council now runs a Pathway to Practice programme that places fresh graduates in industry, a quiet acknowledgment that a degree on its own is not enough. The Higher Education Commission has also started piloting new frameworks at some universities. But Hameed Khan is honest about the limits of this progress. Many companies, he says, simply do not bother trying to influence university curricula anymore. “Curriculum rigidity,” he said, “is a real barrier.”
Shuja’s answer to the structural problem is borrowed not from policy papers but from what he witnessed at Illinois and Oxford, where Intel set up fabrication labs on campus and pharmaceutical spin-offs came directly out of university research.
“Universities are responsible for building these bridges,” he said. “We have plenty of examples of Pakistanis moving abroad and founding successful startups. But why should they have to leave?”
It is a question Engr. Sajid, forty years into a career spent asking Pakistan’s engineers to be more than their degrees prepared them for, would not disagree with. Nor would Aqeel Mohsin, who has spent over two decades converting graduates into professionals one training programme at a time. The argument, all four voices agree, is not about blame. It is about what comes next, and who finally decides to change it.
By Shaza Hameed Khan
