UNDP’s Youth Empowerment Programme has been partnering with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Information Technology Board (KPITB) to provide advanced digital skills trainings—to develop a cadre of experts on skills that are technical and high in demand. The multitude of digital skills required in the market continues to grow whereas people possessing these skills are scarce.

We have trained 1200 youth in KP on skills high in demand, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Big Data Analytics, through an internationally renowned and leading IT firm in Pakistan, Abacus Consulting (Private) Limited.

Our intervention included identification of young and talented people for the training, providing them mentoring services, and connecting youth with industry employers and offering placement in the industry. This also included organizing a Digital Talent Expo to showcase skills of the trained youth from KP, which connected the newly trained job seekers with companies in the local and international market.

Muhammad Ibrahim belongs to Peshawar and was part of our seven days training. He completed the AWS certified Cloud Practitioner and Solution Architect Training, and also acquired the international certification. The certification helped him in advancing his expertise.

‘The training helped me with the certification, as it is quite expensive, and the certification helps. From where I belong, people don’t have awareness of cloud computing. So when this opportunity came, a lot of young people in the area were excited.’

Said Ibrahim.

‘The training helped me to enhance my skills. Whatever I learned I applied it in my work to make it better. Even though all this knowledge is available online, but our instructor was certified, and certification matters.’

He is currently working in SMSAMI INC as a senior Deployment Engineer in their Peshawar office.