How Bangladesh Can Rebuild Its Skills to Build the World

A nation is judged by the work of its hands.

By the weld that holds under stress. By the circuit that doesn’t fail when demand spikes. By whether a caregiver follows protocol -- or improvises.

Right now, the world does not fully trust ours. And before we blame bias or geo-politics, we should admit something uncomfortable: We’ve given the world very little reason to.

This isn’t about effort. Bangladeshi workers work hard. It’s about architecture.

I keep returning to a scene we all know but pretend not to see. A young man, trained at home, certificate in hand, standing in a Saudi testing center. He has paid every fee, attended every class, trusted the system. And then he fails.

Not because he cannot work. But because the certificate he carries is a domestic promise the international market never agreed to recognize. That silent, bureaucratic humiliation is where our development story breaks. And we have normalized it.

Officials often quote a statistic with cautious detachment: nearly 30 percent of Bangladeshi workers fail Saudi Arabia’s mandatory Skills Verification tests.

But numbers without anatomy are anesthesia. That 30 percent is overwhelmingly semi- and low-skilled workers -- not senior technicians, not high-value specialists.

 Which tells us a far more disturbing truth: Bangladeshi workers are not failing out of premium jobs. They are barely even considered for them.

Even the 70 percent who pass see minimal wage mobility. Certification has increased the cost of migration, not its value. We celebrate “upskilling” while exporting the same cheap labor under a more expensive label.

That isn’t progress. That is certified stagnation.

Global labor markets are not hostile to Bangladesh. They are indifferent. High-value roles demand something specific: Documented training lineage, destination-country compliance, language embedded into technical work, and certification trusted before arrival.

We do not deliver this at scale. So the market does not reject us. It simply does not shortlist us. Blaming workers is lazy. The real failure sits upstream.

One ministry trains and certifies. Another sends workers abroad. They are not legally bound to the same definition of competence. A worker can be qualified at home and unqualified overseas at the same time.

That contradiction is not accidental. It is structural. And it explains the 30 percent failure rate better than any individual deficiency ever could. This is why I am not arguing for incremental reform. I am arguing for replacement.

What I am proposing is a National Education & Skills Master Plan -- not a document, but an operating system. Its core rule is brutally simple: no training exists unless it maps to a destination country, a verified certification standard, and a real wage ladder.

Everything else follows from that discipline. The system begins with intelligence.

A National Skills Anticipation Center continuously tracks global demand -- by country, occupation, compliance code, and wage tier -- and converts it into a living National Competency Map. This map is not advisory. It is legally binding.

But intelligence alone does nothing. It must land somewhere real. That place is the district.

Every district translates the national competency map into a District Skills Plan, shaped by migration history, language capacity, demographics, and proximity to industry.

Some districts specialize in Saudi-aligned construction and maintenance tracks. Others in Japanese caregiving, German industrial certification, or East Asian manufacturing.

Not everything everywhere. Focus replaces fantasy. District specialization is enforced through funding, accreditation, and emigration clearance recognition.

This is also where the most dangerous lie in our system finally dies: that career counselling is remedial.

Under this architecture, career counselling becomes mandatory for all students -- technical, vocational, overseas-bound, and college-bound alike. Because random degrees destroy lives just as efficiently as bad migration decisions.

District Career Hubs serve the entire cohort. College-bound students are counselled with the same rigor: program relevance, employability, debt burden, postgraduate outcomes, and wage trajectories -- domestic and global.

University is treated as an economic investment, not a rite of passage.

When college, technical training, and global employment are mapped on the same competency framework -- with transparent costs, risks, and outcomes -- status hierarchies begin to collapse. Choice becomes informed. Not inherited.

Counsellors are licensed professionals, trained nationally and updated continuously with labor-market intelligence. They are evaluated not on enthusiasm, but on accuracy.

Hope is no longer sold. It is engineered.

Now we reach the heart of credibility: Foreign accreditation. The market does not want Bangladesh certifying itself. It wants its own authority.

So we invite destination-country certification bodies -- Saudi, UAE, Japanese, Korean, German, and European employers -- to accredit Bangladeshi training centres directly.

They approve curricula, inspect equipment, audit instructors, enforce language integration, and retain the right to withdraw accreditation.

Bangladeshi training centres are now either foreign-accredited or irrelevant for overseas employment. These centres are not classrooms. They are skill factories.

Training is delivered through high-fidelity simulation labs that replicate real workplace environments abroad -- industrial welding bays, electrical systems, clinical care scenarios -- paired with bilingual technical instruction.

Simulation compresses learning curves. Mistakes happen here, not overseas. Every centre also embeds mandatory industry internships -- with domestic firms and foreign-linked employers.

These placements are evaluated, audited, and counted toward certification outcomes.

Theory meets practice. Employers gain confidence. Graduates arrive job-ready. Foreign accreditation is district-anchored. A district either hosts Saudi-accredited electrical centres or it does not. It either runs Japan-certified caregiving programs or it does not.

No duplication. No vanity centres. District Career Hubs counsel candidates brutally honestly: Language load, failure probability, time horizon, wage ceiling -- before a single taka is spent. Migration stops being roulette. Competition now becomes real.

Training centres compete to attract foreign accreditors, not domestic stamps. Poor performers lose accreditation and market relevance overnight.

Political protection becomes useless when the authority sits in Riyadh, Tokyo, or Berlin. The state stops pretending to certify. It becomes the host, negotiator, and enforcer of trust.

Recruitment agencies that dispatch skilled workers must either operate or partner with certified, foreign-accredited centres. Their privileges -- quota access, clearance speed, high-wage contracts -- are tied directly to pass rates, wage outcomes, and retention.

Language is embedded. Compliance is enforced. Shortcuts disappear. Public funding follows the same logic.

Only foreign-accredited, district-aligned programs are financed. Performance-based funding rewards verified certification, placement, and wage mobility. Politics loses oxygen. Evidence takes over.

An independent National Quality Assurance Authority enforces the system across ministries. Parallel standards are not debated. They are legislated out of existence.

Access matters. So financing is built in. Approved pathways are funded through a Skills Credit Digital Wallet, repaid later through income-contingent mechanisms tied to verified overseas earnings. The state invests first. It recovers only when success occurs.

If this feels detailed, it should. Credibility is not built with slogans. It is built when intelligence, district planning, universal counselling, foreign accreditation, simulation labs, internships, financing, and migration all speak the same language.

The 30 percent failure rate is not the embarrassment. The embarrassment is that even the 70 percent who pass remain locked out of high-value jobs. This architecture ends that. Not by exporting more people. But by exporting trust.

Kawsar Chowdhury is an entrepreneur, commentator, and Co-Chair of the Global Bangladeshi Alliance.