The shortage of skilled human resources is a major factor that hinders Pakistan's emergence as a serious player in the global IT business. Pakistan produces only about 500 computer science graduates each year whereas the figure is as much as two orders of magnitude higher for India. The market however requires a large number of quality software engineers with flexible skills on different platforms, languages, technologies, and software products. In fact, the growth of software industry relies mainly on trained workers, but unfortunately fewer workers have the knowledge and the skills that the industry needs. Pakistanis feel that if a share of this 'software application' market could be captured, local companies might be able to move up from that into other more demanding areas such as hardware manufacturing and development of software products, tools and packages.
Programming is still very labor intensive, and frequently requires great skill.
In the future, this may become less so, as automatic development tools are created and deployed. Later, acquisition of development tools will become capital intensive, requiring larger investments. Pakistanis believe that they have the capacity to become a significant player in the offshore software development business. However, due to lack of entrepreneurial skills and computer literate manpower, Pakistan has not been able to secure any significant share of the global software business. This report discusses the software situation in Pakistan and steps that are being taken to enlarge the pool of qualified IT workers.