Connecting higher education with the labor market in Uzbekistan 

Guest blog by Sardor Jakbarov, IPP ’26

When I started the Implementing Public Policy (IPP) program, my problem seemed relatively clear: how can we better connect higher education with a changing labor market and help graduates transition successfully into employment? 

Uzbekistan has already made important progress in this area. According to the Graduates Quality Index published by our Agency, 83% of 249,432 graduates from the 2025 graduating cohort were employed, with an average time to employment of 2 months and 27 days. These are encouraging results. At the same time, employment rates alone cannot tell us everything about how well higher education responds to employers’ changing needs. 

Working in higher education quality assurance, I initially approached the issue mainly through educational programs and employment outcomes. My logic was straightforward: if universities better understand what employers need, they can continue improving their programs and graduate preparation. 

During IPP, however, my understanding of the problem became broader. I realized that the question is not only what universities teach, but also how universities and employers interact, exchange information, and turn that information into decisions. 

One of the first steps was to deconstruct the problem rather than jump directly to a solution. My fishbone analysis identified eight interconnected causes, ranging from stakeholder coordination and employer engagement to feedback mechanisms, Career Centers, governance, incentives, and shared responsibility for graduate employment outcomes.

The fishbone helped me see the problem as a system of interconnected factors rather than a single curriculum or skills problem. But PDIA also taught me that a diagram is only a starting point. The assumptions behind it need to be tested through action. 

One of the most important lessons I learned from PDIA was not to jump too quickly from a problem to a large solution. Instead, we began by testing our assumptions through small actions. 

We started with a pilot employer survey in two universities. During the pilot, compiling reliable employer contact lists proved more challenging than expected. This highlighted the practical importance of maintaining active and up-to-date employer networks. 

This small experiment became an important turning point for me. 

Formal mechanisms for cooperation already existed. Universities had Career Centers, organized internships, and worked with employers. The pilot encouraged us to look beyond the existence of these structures and ask a different question: 

How can these relationships become more continuous, systematic, and useful for improving education? 

We decided to continue the experiment and launched the National Employer Survey, initially focusing on employers of university graduates. 

Scaling up became an implementation challenge of its own. 

We wanted to use telephone interviews, but introducing this approach required not only a sound methodology but also authorization. I engaged experts from the World Bank, UNESCO, and professional survey and research organizations. Their recommendations helped us improve the approach and, equally importantly, build additional credibility for the proposed method. 

We eventually mobilized more than 150 volunteers to conduct telephone interviews with employers across the country. 

The preliminary results illustrate the scale of the effort. We made 13,412 attempts to contact employers and completed 2,988 successful interviews — 22.3% of all attempts. Employer contact lists were provided for 158 of 170 universities, and at least one successful interview was completed for 155 universities.  

But these numbers taught me something else. 

We started the survey to learn about the relationship between higher education and the labor market. Yet the practical experience of reaching employers, maintaining contact information, explaining the purpose of the survey, and encouraging meaningful participation became another source of learning. 

For me, this demonstrated an important PDIA principle: sometimes the process of collecting evidence teaches you as much as the evidence itself. 

The preliminary findings provided a more nuanced picture than I had expected. 

Among the 2,988 employers interviewed, 52.9% reported an ongoing relationship or cooperation with the relevant university. Another 18.2% reported engagement through internships or practical placements without an ongoing relationship, while 26.7% reported no ongoing relationship. 

These findings suggest considerable opportunity to make university–employer engagement even more continuous and systematic. 

Importantly, the employers in the survey were not simply commenting on higher education in general. They were evaluating specific graduates whose work they knew directly. 

This reinforced the importance of looking beyond formal cooperation mechanisms and understanding how employer engagement works in practice and how feedback can be translated into institutional improvement. 

Perhaps the most interesting finding was one I did not expect. 

I thought the survey might reveal a clear problem with the overall quality of graduate preparation. Instead, employers generally evaluated graduates positively. 

For example, 93.3% rated graduates’ performance of practical work tasks as good or very good/excellent, while 86.6% gave these ratings to graduates’ overall readiness for professional work. 

In addition, 76.7% of the graduates assessed were working mainly in a field related to their university qualification, with another 13.4% working in a partly related field. 

These were encouraging findings, but they also reminded me of an important implementation lesson: we should not approach a problem with predetermined conclusions. 

At the same time, employers identified areas where further improvement would be valuable. When asked what universities should improve first, 40.8% selected more practical skills training, 28.3% selected strengthening graduates’ ability to apply theoretical knowledge to real work tasks, and 21.6% selected stronger professional knowledge. 

There is an important lesson here. 

An employer can be satisfied with a particular graduate while still seeing opportunities to strengthen the system that prepared that graduate. 

This is why complex policy problems should rarely be understood through a single indicator. 

Another important part of my IPP journey was deciding to go into the field myself. 

I visited three regions of Uzbekistan and conducted face-to-face interviews with employers. 

These visits changed how I think about data. 

A table can tell you what is happening. A conversation can often help explain why. 

The field visits showed me that meaningful employer participation requires clear communication about how their feedback will be used. They also highlighted the importance of maintaining current employer networks and building trust with respondents. 

We therefore began using television and other media not simply to publicize the National Employer Survey, but also to explain its purpose and why employer participation matters. 

This taught me that communication is not always a supporting activity in implementation. Sometimes communication is part of implementation itself. 

Another finding made me think about the problem dynamically. 

When employers were asked which competencies would become most important over the next 3–5 years, the leading categories included modern digital technologies and the ability to use artificial intelligence and digital assistants at work. Employers also highlighted the ability to learn new technologies quickly, creativity, and specialized software. 

When hiring graduates, they emphasized professional knowledge, digital skills and specialized software, and the ability to work with modern equipment. Among transferable competencies, responsibility and discipline, teamwork, and communication stood out. 

This points to a broader lesson. 

Labor-market alignment is not something an education system can “solve” once. Even when current employment outcomes are encouraging, technology, occupations, and employer expectations continue to evolve. 

The challenge is therefore to build the capacity to listen continuously, learn continuously, and adapt continuously. 

At the beginning of IPP, I was asking: 

How can we better align graduate preparation with labor-market needs? 

Today, my question is different: 

How can we create a sustainable mechanism through which employers and educational institutions interact regularly, feedback is translated into decisions, and the system adapts as labor-market needs change? 

We have completed the first phase of the National Employer Survey and moved into analysis. The next phase will focus on employers of vocational college graduates. 

The opportunity now is to connect different sources of evidence. Administrative data such as the Graduates Quality Index can tell us about employment outcomes and the transition from graduation to work. Employer surveys can add another perspective: how graduates perform in the workplace, which competencies employers value, and how those needs are changing. 

Together, these tools can help move us from simply measuring outcomes toward continuous learning and improvement. 

Before IPP, I often thought about implementation as moving from a problem toward a solution. 

Now I see it as: 

Problem → small action → feedback → learning → new relationships → adaptation → next action. 

I also think differently about progress. Previously, my main question was: What did we accomplish? 

Now I add two more: 

What did we learn? And what new relationships or opportunities did this action create? 

My understanding of leadership has changed as well. A leader does not always need to arrive with the solution. Sometimes the role is to connect people, build authorization, create space for experimentation, go into the field, listen carefully to evidence, and be willing to revise the original hypothesis. 

Our experience in Uzbekistan has given me one lesson that I believe may be useful elsewhere: 

Do not build a feedback mechanism simply to collect data. Build it so that every iteration helps you understand the problem better, strengthen relationships among the actors, and improve the next action. 

Our National Employer Survey began as a way to better understand the relationship between graduate preparation and labor-market needs. Along the way, it became something more: an opportunity to strengthen dialogue between those who educate graduates and those who employ them. 

My main takeaway from IPP is therefore simple: 

Do not fall in love with your original explanation of the problem. Fall in love with the process of learning about it. 

Sometimes the most valuable result of implementation is not proving that your original assumption was correct. It is finding evidence, relationships, and experience that allow you to ask a better question — and take a better next step. 

Note: Survey findings presented in this blog are preliminary. Final calculations may vary by 1–3 percentage points. 

This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 33 Participants successfully completed this 5-month hybrid program in September 2026. These are their learning journey stories.