Many Hands, Few Skills

Walk into a large factory in Bangladesh and you will often see the same picture. Thousands of Bangladeshi workers fill the floor, while a handful of foreigners in the offices upstairs run production, marketing, IT and quality control.

The floor belongs to us. The decisions, and the salaries that come with them, often do not.

That picture explains our labour market better than most statistics. Bangladesh has never been short of people. With nearly 20 crore citizens and a young median age, we have what economists call a demographic dividend.

But a dividend is only paid on an investment. Without skills, a young population is not an asset waiting to be cashed. It is a liability waiting to grow.

The real question is no longer whether we have enough hands. It is whether those hands can do what the economy of the next twenty years will ask of them.

The numbers are uncomfortable. A SANEM–ActionAid policy brief published in April this year counts more than 85 lakh young people aged 15 to 29 who are not in education, employment or training. Youth unemployment runs at more than double the national rate.

Other estimates of the NEET share are higher still, depending on the age band and survey, but every count points the same way: a large slice of our youth is idle.

What should worry us more is who is idle. In most countries, more education means a better shot at a job.

Here, one ILO estimate puts unemployment highest among those with tertiary education, at nearly 28 percent, and above 32 percent for women graduates. We are producing certificates faster than we are producing capability.

This is the paradox of skill mismatch. Employers say they cannot find people who can run modern machinery, write a clean report or manage a production line.

Graduates say there are no jobs. Both are telling the truth. Our education system trains for exams, while the market pays for competence.

The roots go back to the classroom. From primary school onward, success is measured by how much a child can memorise, not by what they can build, solve or explain. Practical work, problem-solving and communication sit at the margins of the syllabus.

English and digital literacy, the two skills almost every modern employer now assumes, remain uneven across districts. A student can pass sixteen years of exams and still freeze when asked to draft an email or use a spreadsheet.

The system is not failing students by accident. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, for an economy that no longer exists.

Women carry an even heavier share of this burden. Surveys consistently show young women far more likely than men to be outside work, study and training altogether.

Early marriage, safety concerns and household duties keep many at home, and those who do study often find the doors shut afterward. Garment factories once gave millions of women their first wage.

As machines take over simpler tasks, those jobs are thinning, and the women losing them rarely have the training to move up. Leaving half our talent untrained is not only unfair. It is economically reckless.

The first cost shows up in remittance. Bangladesh is one of the world’s largest sources of migrant workers, yet our earnings per worker remain among the lowest. Official data has long classed close to half of our workers abroad as less skilled.

IOM figures cited in the press put the average monthly remittance of a Bangladeshi migrant at around $203, against roughly $564 for a Filipino. We send more people and bring home less per head. Our workers stand on the same Gulf construction sites, just at the bottom of the pay scale.

Then there is money flowing the other way. Because we cannot fill senior technical and managerial roles at home, we import them. A CPD study found foreign professionals in the garment sector alone remitting over $5 billion a year.

Transparency International Bangladesh estimated that about $3.1 billion leaves annually through foreigners employed here, much of it outside official channels. We export cheap labour and import expensive skills. That is a trade deficit of a different kind.

The third cost is productivity. An unskilled workforce keeps us locked in low-value assembly, where margins are thin and buyers can always move to the next cheapest country. Automation sharpens the problem.

The machines arriving on our factory floors need fewer operators and more technicians. Every new line installed without trained people to run it either sits underused or needs a foreign hand.

Artificial intelligence adds another layer. Routine back-office work, basic data entry, call-centre scripts and simple coding are exactly the tasks software now does cheaply.

These were meant to be the next rung on our development ladder after garments. If our graduates only offer what a machine can copy, that rung may disappear before we climb it.

Robotics is the sharper threat for us, because it targets exactly where our jobs are. Automated cutting machines, computer-controlled knitting and early robotic sewing lines are already reducing the number of operators a factory needs per order.

Global buyers are also looking to produce closer to their own markets, and automation makes that cheaper every year. If a robotic line in Mexico or Turkey can stitch a T-shirt nearly as cheaply as a worker in Ashulia, our wage advantage disappears.

The workers most at risk are the least skilled, and they are also the least able to retrain on their own. Without a plan, automation will not just take jobs. It will widen inequality.

Timing matters too. With LDC graduation, the trade preferences that sheltered low-cost manufacturing will gradually fade. We will have to compete on quality, speed and design, not wages alone. A low-skill economy cannot win that race.

Recognising the problem solves half of it. The other half needs coordinated action, not more scattered projects.

First, skills must become a whole-of-government mission. Today education, labour, industry, ICT and youth affairs each run their own programmes, often overlapping and rarely talking to each other.

A national skills strategy should bind them together, with shared targets and one accountable coordinating body.

A strategy is reportedly being prepared, but under the Ministry of Youth and Sports alone. That is too narrow. Skills are as much an industrial and economic question as a youth one.

Second, plans must be local. The skills that matter in Chattogram’s port economy differ from those in Rangpur’s farms or Sylhet’s tourism and remittance belt.

Every district and upazila should have a skills plan aligned with its own economic opportunities, so training follows real local demand rather than a single template drawn up in Dhaka.

Third, information must reach the people it is meant for. A young person in a rural upazila often has no idea which training exists, which certificate employers value, or which support they qualify for.

Government and NGOs should work together to strengthen labour market information systems, a credible national qualifications framework and proper quality assurance, so a certificate means the same thing in Kurigram as in Gazipur, and at home as abroad. Migrants, too, should leave with recognised credentials and language skills, not just a visa.

Fourth, employers must step inside the classroom. Industry cannot keep complaining about unskilled graduates while offering few ways to train them.

Apprenticeships, internships and structured workplace learning should be standard commitments, encouraged through tax incentives. Firms that rely on foreign managers could run succession programmes in which every expert trains local replacements.

Fifth, investment must go beyond training individuals. Money should also build the capacity of industries, training providers and public institutions themselves: better management, modern equipment, qualified instructors and the ability to absorb new technology.

Strong institutions create lasting demand for skills, raise productivity and reduce our dependence on foreign expertise. A trained worker who walks into a badly run factory soon loses both skill and motivation.

Digital skills belong across all of this. Bangladesh already has one of the world’s largest freelancer communities, mostly self-taught.

Structured training in design, data, digital marketing and software testing could let young people earn in dollars without a plane ticket.
None of this is cheap.

But the cost of doing nothing is already being paid every month, in lost remittance, idle youth and salaries leaving the country.

People are not the problem. Untrained people are. A nation of 20 crore can be a burden or a workforce. The difference is skill.

(The writer is Co-founder and CEO at Accfintax and also Associate Director at Hoda Vasi Chowdhury & Co.)