Bangladesh does not merely have an employment shortage. An increasing number of young people fail to find a job after years of education. Existing inequalities in education undermine the country’s efforts to reduce poverty, drive economic growth, and sustain the nation. A gross disparity exists between the return’s education brings to an individual and the likelihood that the individual can gainful employment with their enhanced skills. Bangladesh is facing this challenge. For decades, we have tried to convince families that their children’s future is guaranteed with education. We have convinced them to sell their land and borrow money, reducing household consumption to provide education for their children. However, for many young Bangladeshis, the bridge connecting education and the transition to employment becomes a dead end immediately after graduation.
According to Bangladesh Bureau of Labour statistics, in 2024, 2.62 million people were unemployed. Of them, 2.03 million were between 15 and 29 years of age. Young people thus constituted 76.28% of all unemployed people in the country. Among young people aged 15 to 29, 885,000 were unemployed graduates. The unemployment rate among people with tertiary education was 13.5%, higher than the rate among less educated people. The question Bangladesh has long tried to avoid is this: If education is to prepare young people for a productive adult life, why are the most educated young people in the country having the most trouble?
However, Bangladesh’s unemployment problem is just one of many other problems the country faces. It has a job-creation problem. Approx. 14 million people in Bangladesh became of working age between 2016 and 2022, according to the World Bank. In the same period, the economy created 8.7 million jobs. Curriculum reform alone will not create enough good jobs for 14 million people. Adequate investment, industrial diversification, and stronger private-sector growth in high-productivity areas are needed. However, the education system also fails to create enough jobs. Bangladesh’s education system faces a conundrum: what it rewards and what the real-world needs. In school, students are rewarded for remembering the right answers. In the workforce, answering a question you have never heard is valued. That distinction matters enormously.
Consider what happens to a student over perhaps 12 years of schooling. They are taught to acknowledge that someone else always frames the question, and someone else always knows the answer. They find the answer in textbooks, and success means reproducing it accurately on an exam. Almost overnight, they are expected to work in an economy where the valued employee independently identifies the problem, questions assumptions, communicates ideas, works with people different from them, and uses tools and technologies they are not familiar with. We should not be surprised that they are not ready for this.
The problems begin way before university. The World Bank’s 2024 Learning Poverty Brief estimated that 51 percent of Bangladeshi children of late primary age could not read or comprehend an age-appropriate text at the expected minimum level, after accounting for children out of school. Learning gaps in secondary level maths and other subjects persist. High levels of youth unemployment are not a sudden, unexpected problem that occurs when someone receives a university diploma or certificate. Its foundations are laid many years earlier, in classrooms where progress is made without sufficient learning. Therefore, what an 18-year-old is expected to be capable of doing in Bangladesh needs reconsideration.
Then there is what I shall call ‘integrated literacy.’ Students need to develop literacy in multiple areas, including digital, financial, data and artificial intelligence. We have to teach critical thinking. Students need to learn to identify, analyse, and evaluate information and evidence; be persuasive in their communication; collaborate to achieve results; and be sufficiently innovative and resourceful to address problems they haven’t encountered before. Most importantly, they need to demonstrate these capacities, not simply answer test questions about them.
Traditionally, exams have monopolised our definition of intelligence. However, with proper reforms, we should embrace a variety of other means to assess a student’s learning. The future is rapidly changing with the rise of AI, and to give our students the best start, we should embrace these principles urgently. In South Asia, especially in Bangladesh, many people believe students with good academic results should go to university. In contrast, those with lower results should choose technical and vocational education and training (TVET). This creates an unfair hierarchy in the education system. Changing this perception will require strong social and behavioural change communication (SBCC) efforts.
TVET should also offer an alternative route to higher education and be affordable for students interested in practical and technical skills. This could particularly benefit young women by giving them more education and career choices. Students also need clear information about jobs, industries, income, higher education, and entrepreneurship. Strong career guidance can help young people understand the world of work and make better choices about their future.
Bangladesh must bridge the gap between education and employment. Students can spend 16 years in education without spending even 16 days in a workplace, yet employers expect fresh graduates to have experience. Schools and universities should partner with businesses, hospitals, farms, factories, NGOs, government agencies, and technology companies to provide meaningful workplace exposure. Work experience should not begin after education; it should be part of education. Bangladesh has created an apprenticeship programme with the support of the World Bank. By early 2025, more than 17,000 youth had work-based training, and 90 percent of them found employment or set up a business. This shows that we can learn employability through work experience.
Some work experience is more valuable than listening to a lecture on what it takes to be employable. We need to help young people develop employability skills through work experience. If Bangladesh is serious about building an entrepreneurial workforce, education should help children develop that potential.
Entrepreneurship cannot excuse weak job creation. Telling every unemployed graduate to start a business shifts responsibility from the system to the individual. Bangladesh needs economic reform alongside educational reform. One important step is to measure what happens after graduation – not only grades and GPA-5s, but employment, further study, entrepreneurship, and employer feedback. Education is more than job preparation. It should develop character, integrity, compassion, critical thinking, and responsible citizenship. But it must also prepare young people for economic reality. When thousands graduate with skills the economy does not value, a potential demographic dividend becomes a generation of frustrated, hopeful rejects.
Therefore, employment must become a top policy priority. A country’s educated youth should be its greatest asset. Rites of passage into adulthood, paid employment, independence, and self-definition should be the first fulfilment of human aspirations for youth in the developing world, rather than a struggle to meet these basic needs. The education system in Bangladesh needs several shifts. Memorisation needs to be replaced by problem-solving. Certificates need to be replaced by demonstrated capability. We need to shift from an academic-versus-vocational divide to multiple paths to excellence. We need to shift from career guidance after graduation to career exploration during school, and from classrooms disconnected from the workplace to classrooms connected to it.
For generations, we have asked our children a question: Are you ready for the examination? Perhaps it’s time to reverse the question. After 12 or 16 years of education, multiple examinations, and the certificates we tell children to chase, what happens when students realise they are not prepared to participate in the productive economy? Who then has failed the examination? The student? Or the education system?
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is a UK-based educator, author, and researcher
