Higher education connection with the employment in Bangladesh

The development of a country depends to a large extent on the nature and standard of higher education. Higher education has a huge impact to promote prosperity in developing countries like Bangladesh. Higher educational institutions mostly work as a catalyst to change society and country and remain the center of change and development through nurturing the job employability skill sets among the students.

The higher education system in Bangladesh is facing new challenges of global competencies. Besides, we have a controversial view of our higher education system as the higher educational institutions only focus on classroom study rather than provide the practical or job placement related educations. There is no corporate grooming program for the final year students in public universities through some private universities took this type of initiative some years before. Moreover, most of the public universities students and teachers are engaged with politics which also hamper the regular educations of the students.

Most of the higher educational institutions follow only books for teaching but don’t provide any corporate related training due to proper guidelines to the students. There are shortages of teachers, researchers, laboratories including the public and private universities of Bangladesh. But it is the right time to release learning from the classrooms to the outside world to introduce our beloved students with a professional environment. Learning should go to the student and must extend way beyond the walls of a classroom. Innovativeness, creativity and research attitudes must be encouraged from the very beginning of university life but unfortunately, we couldn’t found this type of approach from our education sector. It seems that there is a lack of proper planning, appropriate guidelines, and corrective measures that are missing to make our higher education system more competitive with other countries. If we look back to the whole education system of Bangladesh starting from the elementary level to the higher education level, we find that the problems lie at every stage of our system. When the students graduated from a university or professional technical institution, many of them do not have adequate knowledge to contribute in their professional life, they just start as a novice without any competency in MS office packages especially in excel and PowerPoint, email writing and ERP software like Tally, SAP and so on! But the employers look for ready-made professionals who can directly be asked to do a specific job whereas all institutions here are better suited for providing training of minds and not training for jobs. As job requirements are continuously changing in this modern era so it is quite difficult to produce tailor-made professionals unless there is regular and structured interaction between academia and industries.

The higher educational institutions should give effort to produce readily- employable professional manpower in the country. The improvement of infrastructure, redesign of curricula, improvement of teaching-learning methods and attracting well-qualified teachers are some of the major steps that need to take immediately by every institution.