Mumbai: Pakistan has developed an indigenous version of global career network portal Monster.com, to help students find placements in the country.

Funded by Pakistan's information and technology ministry and developed by Pakistan's top job portal Rozee.Pk, the new portal will directly link academia to industry and integrate graduating students, faculty and alumni of 85 Pakistani universities.

The services of the project, the first-of-its-kind job portal, will be rolled out across universities and 85 higher education council-accredited campuses free of cost.

The campus career portals project, sponsored by Pakistan's ICT R&D Fund, was launched at a function participating six leading universities and leading industries, on 1 July.

The mother portal will cater to students of all leading universities, including the elite Lahore School of Business Management.

The portal is similar in vision to Monster.com's MonsterTrack used by students to find internship and job placement in US universities, but the technology offers the option of customisation for each university.

''Under this project, the students will be able to build their resumes online, view job postings by over 1,5000 employers, apply and network with peers," Rozee.Pk said in a statement posted on its website.

"The portals will be used by university placement offices to connect students with industry professionals who wish to recruit from the university. It will also allow industry professionals to connect with professors engaging in relevant research through auto-matching algorithms. It will host the software and data on its own servers," the statement said.

The portal will help universities achieve economies of scale and lower the cost of higher education for the common man, through effective and revenue-generating linkage between industry and academia. The use of technology consequently will enable better placement of jobs for graduates as well as a greater ability to showcase faculty talents to sponsoring industry members, the statement added.

The portal can also be effectively used for tracking and facilitating industry-faculty linkages and for research and other activities, including:

• Monitoring and planning of graduate data to measure returns;
• Competent faculty hires based on competitive industry-weighed salaries;
• Accountability in the institution to see academic projects;
• Funding of Research by sponsoring companies;
• Relevant curriculum to fill vacancies in the job market without discrepancies between what is taught in coursework and what is required by companies; and
• Absorption of young population boom into a demand-driven market

The portal was developed by a core team of senior Pakistan-based software architects at Pakistan's top jobsite, Rozee.Pk. The framework of this software has evolved through close collaboration and partnership with leading academic institutions, particularly, LUMS, NUST, FAST, IBA and UCP among others.