Shortage of jobs is a reality but there are also some other cultural problems with the Pakistani job market.
1. Love of Salkari naukri. Everyones golden ticket in life. Don't do any work, get a pension, retire early.
2. Lack of structure in job adverts. In this day and age they're still in newspapers. If you want any job in the UK, google it, even Google with trawl employer websites and job agency sites and bring you back results. Google is not going to bring back the backpages of your Urdu Daily. I was on rescue 1122 site earlier, looked at the careers section, screenshot of a newspaper clipping.
3. Stupid age/height restrictions on jobs, especially govt jobs. Why do you want people in a certain age group? Look at their experience and qualifications, not age.
4. Doctor, Engineer, Lawyer, Officer - the Victorian era limit of our career aspirations as a nation. Heaven forbid anyone want to do anything else. For years I was the black sheep of my family because i was working in IT. Even the amount of money I made didn't seem to matter - it was ridiculous.
5. As mentioned in OP, no will to work as blue collar workers. The guy who fit my gas boiler makes twice my salary. I'm a well to do IT professional, i pay higher rate tax in the UK, he makes twice what I do. His apprentices do most of the labour, he just drives them round from job to job, overlooking them. He is a young Pakistani lad, i was very pleased for him. Most of our youth think money can only be earned selling drugs, driving taxis and running takeaways. The same is true in Pakistan. My young cousin is an electrician, he runs his household costs now at age 19.
Because people in Pakistan are indoctrinated from a very young age "Mera puttar wada afficer bansey". Trust me, I have seen it all during my short life on this planet. MNCs changed their outlook somewhat, but it's still very pervasive.
A dear friend of mine has two bachelors degrees and a masters degree and works as a security guard supervisor earning 28,000 rupees a month. Job creation is necessary, but not at the expense of career development and job security.
There are plenty of "smart start-up's" in Islamabad who abuse young graduates and the like by offering them "unpaid or part-paid internships" making them do donkey work which is completely unrelated to their field or original JD.
My cousin's daughter applied to join a consulting company in Islamabad as an HR intern and they had her doing photocopies and making tea, her direct line manager would message her out of hours, unsurprisingly she quit 2 weeks into the role!
I hope she reviewed them on glassdoors. More Pakistani people need to do that, call out the BS culture in offices. Making someone tea, it's ridiculous.
