For the last few years, Coursera, the world’s largest provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has been publishing the annual Global Skills Report.

Last year’s report covered 100 countries and placed Pakistan at 92 in its global skills proficiency rankings. It stirred up some excitement here because it covered Pakistan in a few more places than most other included countries (‘Pakistan’s skills report’, July 13, 2023). This year’s report was released a few days ago but is less exciting and more muted for Pakistan watchers. The positive news is that the 2024 report now places Pakistan at 84 out of an even larger cohort of 109 countries in the global skills proficiency rankings (up from 92 out of 100 countries in 2023), surpassing regional neighbours like Oman, India, Bangladesh, etc.

In the Asia-Pacific region, Pakistan placed 15 out of 23 countries. It has been classified as lagging (the lowest of four possible categories), both globally and regionally. The skills rankings are broken down across three areas – business, technology, and data science. One thing that stood out to me is that Pakistan scored modestly higher in business skills and modestly lower in the two other technical skill categories relative to immediate neighbours India and Sri Lanka.

Also, interesting (but unsurprising) is where Pakistan does not appear in the report – in the top-20 list of countries by percentage of labour force who are active learners on the Coursera platform (active learners are defined as learners who have started at least one course in the last year). Most learning materials are free to browse but unless a learner has access to Coursera through a government, employer, or university programme, earning a verifiable certificate requires a subscription usually paid by credit card. That is a significant barrier for many in our country.

That is all the Pakistan-specific information in this........

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