Leaders call for competency-based education and deeper industry–academia collaboration to future-proof the country’s largest industrial sector.
Bangladesh’s sixth National Textile Day placed an urgent spotlight on the widening skills gap in the textile and apparel workforce, with policymakers and industry leaders warning that the country’s global competitiveness is increasingly at risk.
Under the theme Growth of the textile sector, prosperity of the economy, the commemorations featured a high-level workshop—Resilience and Reinvention: Creating Skilled Professionals for the Textile and Apparel Sector of Bangladesh. Speakers examined the persistent mismatch between university training and the technical demands of modern production.
Dr Mohammad Abbas Uddin Shiyak of BUTEX highlighted that graduates enter the workforce with strong theoretical knowledge but insufficient machine-level and process-oriented skills. As a result, manufacturers frequently rely on foreign technicians for critical roles, generating foreign-currency outflows and weakening domestic capability. Industry delegates agreed that the skills deficit is simultaneously harming job placement outcomes and undermining factory competitiveness.
The discussion underscored the need for structural reforms in textile education. Stakeholders called for competency-based curricula, strengthened laboratories, greater research capacity, faculty upskilling, and internships designed around real factory conditions. Aligning academic programmes with automation, digitisation and evolving global value-chain technologies is now seen as essential for maintaining Bangladesh’s export resilience.
Adviser Sheikh Bashir Uddin urged tighter collaboration between academia and industry, noting that the sector’s growth trajectory—and Bangladesh’s market position—depends on a workforce equipped for today’s and tomorrow’s manufacturing realities.
Presiding over the event, Bilkis Jahan Rimi committed the Ministry of Textiles and Jute to pursue comprehensive reforms. Industry stakeholders expressed confidence that targeted improvements in training and institutional capacity can strengthen Bangladesh’s long-term competitiveness and support the next phase of export-led growth.
