Soft skills are the real ceiling on Pakistani IT careers

The problem the CEOs agreed on

Muzamil opens with a question for anyone in Pakistan’s IT industry. Do you want to earn 3,000 to 5,000 dollars a month, while you are stuck at 200, 300 or 500 dollars in freelancing or remote work?

He sets it against a familiar promise. Pakistan often talks about building a 10 or 20 billion dollar IT industry. Despite the slogans, he says, the industry still does low-value work and cannot sell its talent at good prices.

To find out why, he spent the past two to three years talking with CEOs of top Pakistani IT services companies and with HR professionals. Their answer surprised him. “We will build the technical skill ourselves,” they told him. Experience could be built too. What they could not fix was soft skills. He says people abroad who hire Pakistani talent told him the same: problems with communication, commitment and time management.

Pakistani engineers keep chasing the next technical course, he says. Learn Python, learn data engineering, and you will be king. “But the number one problem in Pakistan’s industry right now is soft skills.”

The core of IT work, in his view, is problem solving: using technology to solve real business problems. Soft skills are what let you work in a team, talk to technical and non-technical people, and actually solve those problems. Without them, he says, a 500 or 1,000 dollar freelancer cannot grow.

Communication

The first skill is communication. Muzamil is blunt: many engineers have weak English and make no effort to improve it. He knows people in Pakistan mock those who speak English. But English is the language of professional circles worldwide, and you need it to understand a client’s problem and explain your solution.

Accent does not matter, he says. Clarity does. Even people who know English often send emails with poor grammar and formatting, or messages on WhatsApp that read as rude when they did not mean it. In remote work this matters more, because you rarely meet the client. “The better you communicate, the better the project will be.”

His advice is practical. Search YouTube for professional and communication skills, and watch the top videos from creators worldwide to see how professionals elsewhere think and write.

Problem solving, adaptability and critical thinking

Muzamil calls problem solving the core of the industry. He recently spoke with the CEO of a well-known Lahore company, who told him he interviews 100 to 150 people every month or two. Ninety-nine percent sell their programming skills well. Then they reach the company’s test, which is built on IQ and problem solving, and they fail.

He blames rote learning. Graduates arrive able to copy a basic solution, much as some freelancers resold a few WordPress templates to the whole world. “That will not work in the world of AI,” he says. What clients pay for is the efficient, cost-effective answer to their business problem, whether it takes four lines of code or ten thousand. To learn it, he recommends business case studies and problem-solving games.

Adaptability follows from this. New languages and tools appear every couple of years, and new technology always pays more because few people can do it. He warns young engineers who were the best at one language in university against becoming overconfident. “That was an old time. A new time has come.”

Critical thinking is the ninth skill on his list, and he ties it to how Pakistani children are raised. Parents decide everything, from school to food. So as adults, many cannot make decisions without someone telling them what to do. IT work is constant decision making. His advice is to take control of your own decisions, little by little, and the thinking will follow.

Teamwork, leadership and mentorship

Most well-paid IT work, especially enterprise work, is team based. You collaborate with designers, project managers, and sales and pre-sales staff. Muzamil sees a downside in Pakistan’s freelancing boom and its “be your own boss” message. What one person can do alone, such as a website, a graphic or a small data analysis, is mostly low-value work.

He also notices ego and low trust across the industry. Everyone assumes others will cheat them, so firms refuse to combine forces and bid for large projects together. Learning to collaborate teaches you to take others’ input seriously and to resolve conflict.

Leadership is the eighth skill. People expect a manager’s title after four or eight years and wonder why it does not come. In his view, they lack the skill. Management means human problems, pressure and responsibility. A good manager keeps people motivated and invests in their growth. He frames this as a national habit worth breaking: “No one can grow until the people under them grow.” Everyone rises on the shoulders of the people below them.

Time management and attention to detail

On time management, Muzamil does not soften his view of South Asian habits. Pakistanis say they will meet at 2 and arrive at 2:30, he says. Foreign clients take your word seriously. If you promise delivery at 4, they wait for 4, and poor timekeeping drives them away. In live production environments, missed deadlines can cost a company real money.

Attention to detail is the sixth skill. A small mistake in code can grow until it breaks a whole product. He criticizes the “jugaad” and “chalao kaam” mindset of doing just enough. Detail is what separates an experienced resource from a new one. It applies in design too, where a line slightly out of place should bother you.

He gives his own example. When he wanted a website, most quotes were 50,000 to 70,000 rupees, and the work he saw was a template with content pasted in. The developer he chose asked for 8 lakh rupees, and he negotiated it to about 5 lakh. He paid it because the work was fast, polished and free of problems. “Paying 5 lakh saved me the headache,” he says, and saved him time he could spend earning elsewhere.

Customer relationships

The seventh skill is customer orientation. Many people in IT and freelancing are introverted or curt with clients, Muzamil says. But you are dealing with clients directly, so service must be excellent. He compares it with a restaurant: the food may be great, but a rude waiter means you never return.

He asks freelancers to take ownership of the client’s problem. “Your problem is my problem, and we will solve it together.” That builds trust. He also explains the economics. A client’s first project is always cheap, because the client is testing you. Real money arrives when the same client returns four, five or six times and pays extra for work that comes without headaches.

He asks people working for American and European clients to drop what he calls their Pakistani baggage: the assumption that everyone is out to cheat them. Some clients may be fraudulent, he says, but most are there to solve a real problem.

Resilience and stress

The tenth skill is resilience and stress management. High-value work for large companies moves fast and comes with pressure. His advice is simple: if stress overwhelms you, see a psychologist. He rejects the stigma. “You are not going to a psychologist because you are mad,” he says. You go so someone can help you structure your problems and solve them one by one. He adds that judgment from friends and family makes this harder in Pakistan, which is why a professional helps.

He closes with his main point. These soft skills, he says, matter more than any programming language, because they show up in every interaction with a business. Technical skills can be learned over time. “If you miss soft skills, you will stay stuck your whole life, and you won’t understand why you are not growing.”