Market Demand of Private University Graduates: An Empirical Analysis Using Skills Needed for Development Partner

Abstract

In the onset of 1980, Government, educators, and employers prepared a series of reports identifying key skills and implementation strategies to guide students, workers towards meeting the demands of the changing world. Finally, the abridged list of skills refers to the learning skills, literacy skills, and life skills which are felt important for the success of students in the current situations. The students required these skills when shift to college, university, workplace and in full-aged life. The components of those skills were: creative thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity, technical literacy, media literacy, computer literacy, flexibility, initiatives, social-skills, productivity, and leadership. To provide knowledge and training on those skills individual academic institutions required standards capacity level for producing right graduates. In our society a significant level of gaps is persistently lying between the demand and supply of human resources. This may result large percentage of structural unemployment. As a result, it is felt to design the study for finding out the immediately needed skills, and skills to be made available in the moderate time frame, and skills to be made available in the remote time frame. These have been worked out by interviewing 300 passed out graduates from 10 selected universities functioning in our society. The study validates the data collected from the students holding discussions with employer’s representatives and organizing FGD. A binary logistic-regression model along with PCA techniques were deployed for grouping the skills into immediate, moderate time remote time frame. The estimated results of the parameters of the model are found very significant which means that the model fitted to the data significantly. On the basis of the estimated model, the immediately, needed skills are identified as communication, creativity, initiative and media literacy. The second group of skills that should be made available in the moderate time frame is included as: critical thinking, information literacy, leadership and productivity. Lastly, the study suggested that the skills on technology literacy, collaboration, flexibility and social-skills should be made available for building a complete man in the long time frame because these concepts, knowledge, and skills depend on learning and practices with sincerity.