Microsoft Pakistan Signs An Education Transformation Agreement with Punjab Group of Colleges

Microsoft Pakistan signs its Empowering Education Transformation Agreement (ETA) with Punjab Group of Colleges (PGC) to provide the foundational elements for a successful education digital transformation strategy. This ETA with its Future Ready Skills platform will enable PGC to train their staff and students on Microsoft tools and empower them to bridge the gap between education and employability. PGC successfully certified over 7500 students/ faculty in the areas of MOS / MTA and Fundamentals last year with a grand success rate of over 90% and is all gearing up for larger targets this year.

Punjab Group of Colleges is an avid user of Microsoft technology. With Tower Technologies Limited (TTL) being its technical arm, PGC has built solutions that scale the entire organization using Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing platform. Tower Technologies operates most of the business-critical infrastructure and applications for Punjab Group of Colleges and its team of developers is working continuously to modernize their applications using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, DevOps, and a host of other capabilities offered through Azure. PGC runs one of the biggest E-learning platforms consisting of thousands of on-demand video lectures for its students hosted on Azure. Internet of Things (IoT) is another core focus area for the group and Azure IoT Hub places an integral role in connecting hundreds of devices spanning the province helping the team build monitoring solutions that can scale per demand.

Ms. Hajra Afzal, Director of IT at Punjab Group stated, “Our Group is determined to implement digital learning tools and technologies in every single classroom in Pakistan. We envision our students to be able to compete at the international level and we want to excel at the digital technology transformation happening in institutes across the globe. Partnerships such as the ETA help tremendously with enabling our youth to achieve more.”

On this occasion, Mr. Jibran Jamshad, Country Education Lead at Microsoft Pakistan stated, “We at Microsoft are determined to design customized education products and services to support distance learning programs across the world. The education sector has been our prime focus in Pakistan as it has been lacking on the digitalization front. For years, we have worked closely with PGC to introduce various digital learning platforms such as Office 365, Teams, Future Ready Skills, and the three clouds. This concentrated effort was a part of a grand vision to connect each education institution to adopt the best learning practices and bring uniformity to the system. With our solutions, we help ensure that students not only stay engaged and learn seamlessly but also become more creative and hands-on with the latest developments on the digital horizon.”

Punjab Group of Colleges has scaled its Microsoft capabilities over the years. The College uses teams for remote learning, SharePoint and OneDrive for data sharing and storage, and streams for lecture recordings. These tools have enabled PGC to provide undisrupted online education to hundreds of thousands of students across Pakistan during the pandemic. Moreover, it also helped build a Modern Certification Platform to enable a seamless experience for students to certify themselves with Microsoft Certifications and attain future-ready skills.