Zulfiqar Ali Shirazi
Every year the statistics get grimmer worldwide, as graduates send out hundreds of applications to employers and hear nothing back. Entry-level postings keep asking for experience, and job seekers keep emphasising in interviews that only a job can impart the requisite experience; the chicken-or-egg analogy at work. Companies discontinue or replace roles citing rightsizing or technology-related redundancies. Young people fret these increasing numbers and feel they arrived at exactly the wrong moment in history.
They are not wrong about the numbers, but the numbers are not the whole story. The problem foremost is that most young people are taught to look for a job; a misleading criterion for decision-making. A job is a position inside someone else’s organisation, created for someone else’s purposes, and eliminated the moment there is a change of purpose. A craft is different: a skill you build inside yourself that no one can delete with a restructuring memo. Surgeons have a craft. Mechanics have a craft. Engineers who can actually apply their solving acumen to a problem, not just hold a title, but a craft too. It therefore survives the collapse of any single employer because it is not indigenous to that employer. It’s the person who holds it, acquiring it as a learned behaviour over a period of time.
The most common second mistake is chasing whatever field the last generation had declared as a safe bet. In fact, every generation gets a golden ticket narrative. It goes “learn this language”, “study this subject”, “get this certification”, and you won’t be disappointed. The list changes every few years and misleads with impressive consistency. It is tantamount to outsourcing your judgment to people with no special insight into your life or the times in which you have to work through.
In my opinion, the preferred but harder approach calls upon a young person to make use of their own observation of the world, and not to refer to a borrowed list, to figure out what the market actually needs. Modern-era access to information makes it a bit easier, though. The strongest or most persistent motivation rarely comes from a ranking of in-demand professions, but more often it stems from having lived through a specific problem and deciding to do something about it. Such a reason lingers even when the job market gets harder and only grows stronger with it, because difficulty becomes one more obstacle to push through rather than a reason to quit.
Credentials still matter. But a credential without a craft and without a clear sense of what need it serves is just paper. A degree shows an employer you completed a program; it does not show you can solve the problem for which they intend hiring.
The disruption that makes this urgent rather than theoretical is the advent of AI. It is not a future risk. It is already removing the bottom rungs of the career ladder. Entry-level analysis, first-draft writing, basic coding, routine customer support, junior research- the tasks young people used as a training ground while building real skill- are exactly what bots now perform at speed and near zero cost, making the shell of entry-level market all the tougher to crack open. Companies still need experienced judgment. They need managers less wrapped in twenty junior staff doing repetitive work underneath it. The traditional path of getting hired, doing simple tasks for five years and slowly earning responsibility, is breaking down as the simpler tasks are the ones being automated first.
The response is not to forsake technology. It is to refuse to compete with it on its own terms. A machine can produce a passable first draft in seconds, but it cannot take responsibility when it is wrong, build client trust, or carry the judgment and hands-on execution a real career still requires, so staying relevant means using AI for routine work and spending the time saved on exactly those things. Young people should treat fluency with these tools as a baseline requirement and not a threat.
For Pakistani youth, this stacks on top of a local job market already strained before AI arrived. Formal sector hiring has not kept pace with the number of graduates produced every year. A large share of available local positions are administrative or clerical; the category most exposed to automation. Treating any local job as the finish line is no longer safe, because the supply of graduates outpaces the availability of positions in the market.
This makes two things matter more for Pakistani graduates than those elsewhere. The first is building a craft that travels the globe through the internet; AI-adaptive, value-added skills which were practised in bygone decades, sold to a client anywhere in the world. It leverages young Pakistani access to a market which is many times larger than the local one. The second is recognising the international route does not mean abandoning Pakistan. It means using global income and standards to eventually serve a local need; the same craft-and-need logic applied across borders. Strategising as such offers a real shot at relevance under dynamic market conditions.
Awaiting certainty is itself a risky decision. Nobody knows what the job market will look like in ten years, in Pakistan or anywhere else. The people who did well still don’t carry an accuracy to predict the future. So, whom to emulate or whom to look up to? They are and will remain the ones who built a real transferable skill and stayed close to a genuine need to fulfil, locally or globally.
Therefore, an AI-driven hard job market does not eliminate craft and need as strategies, but reinforces them. Graduates who give up on effort and go with the status quo will struggle longer than those who get specific and remain certain at best in this age of uncertainty; harbingers of change, effecting out-of-the-box solutions.
The writer is a freelance columnist and can be reached at zulfiqar.shirazi@gmail.com
