By Ruvini Jayasinghe
A compelling issue in the current employment landscape in our country is the mismatch or gap between the expectations of employers in hiring skilled labour and the inability of our workforce to deliver or meet these expectations.
While our country’s youth are trained to join the work force at various government and non-government tertiary education and training institutes in a vast spectrum of skills, the annual output of trained or skilled labour joining our existing workforce is not prepared and adequately qualified to meet the demands of the current market requirement, especially in skilled labor, according to industrialists and other businessman.
A good example is the several Industrial Development Zones in the country, where the increasingly high demand for technical skills and other required skills are not totally met by our workforce. Yet, ironically unemployment is high for a developing country at 4.2 % and a per capita income of Rs. 666, 817. Frustrated employers, mainly in the industrial and technical sectors blame inefficient government policy and machinery to get our work force well trained for the industry driven development of our emerging economy.
Higher Education only for 30,000
About 200,000 students in our country sit for their Advanced Level examinations each year. Of these students only a handful, a mere 30,000 enter our universities for higher education. While our universities roll out a new generation of academics and professionals from teachers, doctors, engineers, IT professionals to agriculturists etc., the majority of students who successfully complete their A/Ls, but fail to qualify for entrance to our universities, are sucked into our national workforce.
Read BMD July 2019 for more details…