Pakistan’s first nationwide IT skills assessment has returned results stark enough to prompt Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to chair an emergency review meeting and order a third-party audit of university information technology curricula, after the National Skills Competency Test revealed that the overwhelming majority of computing graduates across the country fall well short of the standards required by global technology employers.
The meeting was briefed on the results of the National Skills Competency Test recently conducted by the Higher Education Commission to evaluate the capabilities of IT graduates and assess whether university curricula were producing industry-relevant skills, with 33,038 students from 190 higher education institutions across the country participating under strict monitoring and transparent procedures at designated centres nationwide. Only 0.4 percent of participants secured more than 80 percent marks, while 3.6 percent scored between 68 and 79 percent. Another 13.2 percent obtained between 58 and 67 percent marks, and 21.3 percent scored between 50 and 57 percent, meaning that more than 60 percent of the country’s most advanced computing students, those in their seventh and eighth semesters, scored below the halfway mark on a test designed to benchmark them against contemporary industry expectations.
The exam was conducted in April 2026 as a synchronised, computer-based test across the country using the Virtual University platform, with 40,784 students registering and 33,038 candidates appearing, reflecting an 81 percent attendance rate. The test was held across 112 cities in 165 centres, consisting of 100 questions to be completed in 120 minutes across four daily sessions. The programme was overseen by a multi-stakeholder steering committee formed in November 2025 on the Prime Minister’s directive, including representatives from the Higher Education Commission, the Ministry of IT and Telecommunication, PSEB, PASHA, the National Computing Education Accreditation Council, and the Virtual University, with the goal of improving industry-academia collaboration, strengthening curriculum design, and establishing a verified national IT talent pool for employers.
Responding to the results, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said young people must be equipped with skills that meet global industry requirements, adding that IT education in most universities was unfortunately not aligned with contemporary technological needs. The bluntness of that assessment, delivered by the head of government rather than buried in a committee report, signals that the test results are being treated as a genuine policy emergency rather than a routine benchmarking exercise. The prime minister ordered a third-party audit of university IT programmes and directed the development of a roadmap specifically targeting artificial intelligence, data science, and robotics education to close the gap between what universities teach and what the industry actually needs.
The findings carry particular weight given the scale of ambition Pakistan has attached to its information technology sector, with the government targeting $15 billion in IT exports by 2030 and committing to train one million people in artificial intelligence. Those targets depend fundamentally on a pipeline of graduates who possess skills that international employers and clients will pay for, and a result showing that fewer than four in every hundred final-year computing students can demonstrate even reasonably strong competency suggests that the supply side of Pakistan’s IT export ambitions is significantly less developed than the demand-side targets assume. The test’s design, however, also represents a genuine institutional achievement in its own right: this is the first time Pakistan has produced a synchronised, nationally comparable dataset on the actual competency levels of its computing graduates, replacing anecdote and institutional self-reporting with a verified benchmark that policymakers, employers, and universities themselves can now act upon. Students who performed well will receive a joint certificate from HEC, PSEB, and PASHA and be included in a national talent pool accessible to employers in Pakistan and abroad, giving the test both a diagnostic and a practical talent-matching function even as its headline numbers point to a curriculum overhaul that the prime minister has now made an explicit policy priority.
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