When the Pakistan government issued manufacturing licenses for electric vehicles to 31 companies in October 2023, Zyp Technologies was part of the coveted list. The company, which has been running an EV two-wheeler factory in Lahore since September 2022, made a batch of 10 bikes and a battery-swapping station for a customer in 2023. While getting a formal license would enable it to manufacture and sell at a commercial scale, there’s a new challenge facing Zyp: a talent crunch.

Over the past year, the company has had to invest significant time and money into training its 25 workers on EV technologies. “We have a lot of [manpower]; we don’t have a lot of expertise,” Hassan Iqbal Khan, Zyp’s CEO, told Rest of World. “We can train [our staff], and that is what our company is doing.”

Currently, Zyp’s factory workers are learning about embedded software systems that enable batteries to communicate with the rest of the vehicle.

“We have a shortage of embedded software experts [in Pakistan], and it’s difficult to find good programmers,” Khan said. So far, most companies have been assembling bikes, importing “CKD” (completely knocked down) components, such as drive-trains from China, and assembling locally. “[But] if you want to do this from scratch yourself, companies will run into trouble with finding the right talent,” said Khan. 

“There is a fundamental disconnect between the government’s target and the state of the country’s workforce.”

There has been a scurry for EV-related expertise in Pakistan since 2019, when the government announced its National Electric Vehicle Policy — along with a lofty goal to ensure 30% of all new vehicles sold in the country are electric by 2030, and 90% by 2040. Though around 25,000 students graduate with various engineering degrees in Pakistan each year, there is an acute shortage of trained workers in the EV sector. Only two private universities — Habib University and the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) — offer EV specialization to engineering students. Pakistani academics and industry experts told Rest of World this is not enough to meet the government’s aim.

“There is a fundamental disconnect between the government’s target and the state of the country’s workforce,” Haleema Qamar, who teaches a course on EVs at Habib University in Karachi, told Rest of World. Qamar is the only professor teaching a course on EVs at the university. She said her students are ill-equipped to work in the industry as they “have no flavor of hardware expertise, and building a research lab or getting access to machinery for it is very expensive.”

Without adequate investment in training, the government is unlikely to achieve its goal, Qamar said. “The need of the hour are research labs in universities that equip students with hands-on experience that they can then use after they’ve graduated and are part of the workforce,” she said.

Rest of World reached out to the Pakistan Engineering Development Board and the Ministry of Climate Change to understand how the government plans to overcome the skilled worker shortage in the EV sector, but did not receive a reply by the time of publishing. 

For greater adoption of EVs, Pakistan needs “highly qualified” engineers who have the capability to develop lithium-ion battery packs — and there’s an acute shortage of such skills, according to Naveed Arshad, co-director of the LUMS Energy Institute. “There are very few electrical engineers in Pakistan to begin with, let alone highly specialized power electronics engineers, embedded software engineers, and EV software engineers,” he said.

With no formal training, young engineers who aspire to work in the EV space have been struggling.

For Osama Rizwan, who graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Habib University in 2018, getting a job at an EV company was not too hard, but he wishes his undergraduate program had been more rigorous. “I definitely wish that we had access, at least to the local industries, and had done projects with them over the summers or some research-focused work with the industries,” he told Rest of World. 

“[The university could] set up a research lab where students have access to manufacturing facilities, but also the academic side of things, which I think is super important,” Rizwan said. “And that’s also how North American universities work, right? They collaborate with industries.”

“My electrical engineering batch had 164 graduating students in 2020, from which at least 40 are now abroad.”

For students who attend public universities, moving into the EV sector comes with bigger challenges. Mujahid Abdullah graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the state-owned University of Engineering and Technology (UET) in Lahore in 2020. When he started working at the LUMS Energy Institute as an embedded software engineer, he had to start from scratch. “Courses at UET were [on general topics], there was no specificity,” he told Rest of World.

Though he has now spent over two years researching battery-swapping technologies for three-wheelers, Abdullah said his learning curve continues to be steep. “As an embedded software engineer, my expertise is limited to EV software, and the only reason why I was able to learn so much is because I was working here [at this private institute],” he said. 

The shortage of skilled workers means that companies investing in training constantly run the risk of poaching by local or foreign rivals, Usman Sheikh, co-founder of Jolta Electric, one of Pakistan’s first electric bike-assembly companies, told Rest of World.

“People are inclined to leave [for other countries], that’s a no-brainer,” Sheikh said, pointing out how EV assembly and production are being carried out at a dizzying pace in several other countries, such as India and Vietnam. “Pakistan began EV manufacturing in 2018 when no one [here] knew about it. Because of the political situation in Pakistan, there has been zero progress … and morale in the industry is also really low.”

Abdullah said many of his classmates have left the country. “My electrical engineering batch had 164 graduating students in 2020, from which at least 40 are now abroad, and several are working at places like Tesla and Lucid Motors,” he said.

Some EV startups are pinning their hopes on existing talent in adjacent sectors. Mohammad Hadi, CEO of Islamabad-based EV assembly company ezBike, for instance, is counting on Pakistan’s rich history of motorcycle manufacturing to support the future of e-bike production. While he anticipates an EV talent crunch at the intersection of mechanical and electrical engineering, Hadi told Rest of World he doesn’t see it happening anytime soon. “So India has [a talent shortage] because they have such massive growth in the EV sector. But in Pakistan, there’s like, a couple of 100 people working in the EV industry, so we haven’t reached that point yet,” he said. 

Hadi hopes Pakistan’s motorcycle-manufacturing talent is able to repeat history in the EV space. “We have a huge advantage in the fact that there’s this 40-year history of producing motorcycles in the country,” he said.