Upskilling Bangladeshi Youth in emerging technologies

Our challenge is that the youth of Bangladesh are missing out on the opportunity to gain marketable skills in emerging technologies as a result of which the skills gap in the ever evolving domestic and international technology market is widening. This disconnect impedes the country to fully harness the potential of its burgeoning tech sector, attract foreign currency and investment, and retain homegrown talent, subsequently hindering its progress towards becoming a globally recognized player in the technology landscape.

The world demand of outsourcing business processes have grown at a staggering rate in recent years. Market Watch projected a world demand of $353-billion by 2024, and only about half of the demand has been fulfilled by the market. The demand presents a huge opportunity for Bangladesh youth to participate in this globalized market, offering its youth skills to the world market while staying in the country, while earning dollars for the economy—through the power of cloud computing and the internet. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and IT-enabled services in Bangladesh have also been maintaining a double-digit Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) over the last ten years. Also, the domestic market share of local IT/ITES firms is growing rapidly, which is reducing the country's import dependency. Despite being much smaller than global offshore leaders like Philippines and India, the IT/ITES sector in Bangladesh has been demonstrating one of the highest growth rates indicating huge domestic and export potential. The availability of a large pool of skilled personnel that is proficient in the new digital skills demanded by the world IT-market and those required to provide services at the top of the BPO value chain is thus crucial. However the current mainstream tertiary education system of the country is inadequate in providing students and youth the opportunity to gain marketable skills in emerging technologies to meet the growing demand. The UNDP Bangladesh Accelerator Lab has been working extensively in the area of upskilling youth since the last two years, focusing on researching and designing a scalable online model for Bangladeshi youth to learn emerging technologies that are in high demand by the global IT market and which will accelerate their employment in the rapidly growing ICT domestic and export services market.  The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Division of the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology of the Government of Bangladesh is currently implementing  the 'Enhancing Digital Government & Economy Project' (EDGE). One of the sub-components of EDGE project requires training 80,000 Bangladeshi youth, specifically 4th year CSE/IT university students, in emerging technologies such as AI/ML, AR/VR, Data Science, IoT, etc. by 2026. This is a a clear match on what the Lab has been developing and the model proposed by the lab addresses the government's concern of training a large number of youth in an effective manner which is also time and cost efficient. 

Bangladesh Accelerator Lab since it began has been working extensively in the area of upskilling youth. During COVID, in one of our horizon scanning exercises, we identified that Bangladeshi youth came out on top in terms of the highest new enrollments in online courses during COVID in the entire world. This led to the Lab focusing on researching and designing a scalable online model for Bangladeshi youth to learn emerging technologies that are in high demand by the world IT market and which will accelerate their employment in the rapidly growing ICT domestic and export services market  The Lab completed two major pieces of research (attached) to support its hypotheses: Assessment of Skills Demand and Gaps in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Industry of Bangladesh b) Study on Exploring Student Perspective on Micro-credentials (the first of its kind research in Bangladesh). We further consolidated the insights in a Policy Note, drafted a proposal for a pilot, and ran data deep dives with Bangladeshi student data offered to the Lab by the organization edX. As of now, the Lab can be considered a pioneer institute in Bangladesh to design any initiatives around upskilling a large number of youth on emerging technologies. We know sufficiently about what needs to be taught and how it needs to be taught, including technical design, partnerships, curriculum, learning delivery design, assessments, etc. It is worth investing resources to this challenge because the learnings generated by the lab so far can now be tested through a co-design partnership with the government who is the ultimate stakeholder with capacity to scale effectively scale up the model and bring real change to the status quo of the challenge.

AccLab Bangladesh working towards up-skilling youth in emerging and disruptive technologies to meet the demand of a digitally ambitious country

What research should inform the selection of relevant emerging technologies for the Bangladesh context and our youth?  How accurate are data sources for project performance evaluation?  Who is the most appropriate body to offer relevant and effective training? Who is giving certification? What global credibility and local acceptability do they have? Do employers value them? Do students find them appealing?   How will this training be conducted on a cost-efficient and high-reach scale? How to make sure students complete the training? Is there an assessment to evaluate students’ improvement in trained technology?  What is the timeline? How many hours of training? If virtual, is there a live session? Can the Government gain student performance data, powerful data that can offer critical insights?    What is the expected outcome and the impact envisioned? How does the training help students with employment? Is a blended education model forging collaboration with top international and local universities an effective way to up-skill youth in emerging technologies in a cost and time efficient manner? Can this model be adapted to up-skill youth from less privileged backgrounds with access issues?

Co-creation: Designing a rapid skilling methodology along with government. Pilot: Testing out a model for rapid up-skilling in technology space;  Sensemaking: Carry out sector analysis on digital skills including domestic demand in Bangladesh and global market demand. Collective intelligence: Collaboration with multiple stakeholders, co-designing with different partners and decisions informed by muliptle-stakeholder consultations, surveys and discussions. 

Student learning patterns, student performance data which can give the government powerful insight, data to measure effectiveness of blended education for up-skilling etc.

Testing out the co-designed pilot to up-skill youth through a blended education model could make way for replication in other contexts and skills, especially for youth in more disadvantaged contexts and with access issues. Local educational institutions will also benefit from the knowledge and technical capacity transfer from globally reputed universities.