Expats penetrating local job market

The Sri-Lankan job market will get tougher for the future professionals, due to the fact that the expatriates, mainly from the neighbouring countries, are penetrating the local job market.

“Sadly, the country has a strategy of exporting unskilled labour and allowing the importation of very expensive professionals by default of otherwise, which I term as a ‘Suicidal Strategy’ from our country’s perspective,” said Managing Director cum CEO, Chevron Lubricants Lanka, Kishu Gomes.

Delivering the keynote address at the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) at Trans Asia Hotel recently he said that this situation, should be addressed immediately. Speaking on the theme Developing Future Professionals’ he said that there is no better strategy to counter this issue than elevating the knowledge and skills and thereby developing the professional standards of the local workforce.

“If Sri Lanka is to achieve economic independence, the only resource we have in abundance is the people resource. Every other resource that can be used to generate revenue for the country has its own limitations. We have over 8 million people in the workforce - but with 14 per cent under employment and 6.5 per cent unemployment. So in absolute terms, more than 1.6 million people in the workforce are not making a meaningful contribution to the country’s economy,” he said.

“As a practitioner, I see the need to close the gaps between the confidence and willingness to take on the challenges, ability to apply knowledge to create commercial value, good people skills, attitude and commitment towards work and continuous skill development to keep pace with the evolving trends in the job market in the Sri-Lankan work force relative to global and regional competition.

“In another words; growing your capacity and competencies is the only solution to the growing issues in the operating environment,” he said.

People who lack professionalism believe that yesterday was better than today and they expect tomorrow to be better. This aspiration sets in complacency and forms wrong attitudes in the workforce in dealing with the situation.

The distinction though is that the professionals are convinced that tomorrow will be much tougher than today and in fact it will get tougher by the day. This reality should be the basis for any decision making. It’s obvious that higher the degree of professional competency - easier it is to perform the job to deliver maximum value to the employer or to create value for self in the case of entrepreneurs.

The ‘true professionals’ have an obligation to the people to navigate the turbulent environment smoothly and bring about some level of certainty to the world. Airing his views on the global economy he identified six major issues, energy crisis or imbalance between demand and supply, (energy demand is expected to be about 40 per cent higher by 2030).

Population growth, (world population doubled over 40 years to six billion in 1999 and it will be nine billion in 34 years time from now) food shortage (last year, global food prices have increased by 43 per cent and by 100 per cent over the past three years) economic impact of natural disasters (direct economic losses from natural disasters multiplied by five fold to US$ 629 billion in the past decade) terrorism and related expenditure, (global military expenditure and arms trade form the largest spending in the world at over 1 trillion dollars in annual expenditure and it is estimated to have reached US$ 1204 billion by 2006) and epidemics (cost of managing epidemics are increasing rapidly worsening the global economy) impacting the global economy thus everyone’s lives.

There has been a profound and fundamental change in the world economy over the past decade. The very triumphant financial liberalisation and deregulation have also produced a deepening crisis that its advocates scarcely expected. It’s inevitable that Sri-Lanka will face the consequences of the recent global economic meltdown sooner or later.