Why graduates continue to lack skills sought by companies

Dinesh Weerakkody

Many explanations have been given by very eminent people at various for a regarding the unemployment situation among the educated youth in Sri Lanka.

The most important hypothesis is the prevalence of a skills mismatch where the education system is not providing what the labour market needs.

Another explanation given is that the public sector employment and wage policies operating in the country lead to a queuing behaviour among the population for the attractive jobs.

A third hypothesis is that the existence of stringent labour market regulations prevents employment creation in the private sector.

Even though we have all this data with us graduate unemployment is still a huge problem in Sri Lanka, despite many genuine attempts being made to bring about a solution to the problem the attempts have largely failed because the current education and skills development infrastructure both in the public and private sectors have still not been fine tuned to produce graduates that can meet the private sector skills needs.

Therefore, unless we make those fundamental changes within our education system in the country the system will not deliver the numbers and quality desired and we will continue to have forums after forums to discuss graduate unemployment.

So in the short term from the private sector side we need to identify and map the graduates’ job and career expectations. Then the university system, need to identify the private sector talent and skills needs and work closely with the private sector to get the short-term HR interventions in place.

Then, the state needs to work with the private sector and the education/training providers to retune the infrastructure to supply the country’s manpower requirements.

Many surveys have revealed that in general, university graduates lack the basic hygiene skills sought by employers like speak and write with impact, adaptability, self-confidence and basic commercial knowledge.

Therefore the gap between employers’ expectations of skills and career expectations of graduates from Sri Lankan universities though somewhat known have still to be bridged.

Way forward

Hence, the government, the university administrators, employers and graduates themselves must all endeavour to find a practical solution like in India to fill this gap.

This can be achieved to some extent if there is greater collaboration between the university administrators and the private sector for; on-campus recruitment, private sector secondments, regular private sector initiated guest lectures, private sector led management development programs, regular upgrading of the course content and finally helping graduates to face interviews.

Whatever people may say we are confronted with three huge issues ; a) Our universities do not generate the required labour skills for the country B) Our graduates lack knowledge about the reality of the labour market this mismatch has led to a larger number of unemployable graduates and this will continue to escalate unless the gap is researched and addressed and C) Many graduates prefer to join the public sector and be under employed.

Therefore, in order to create more productive jobs for the educated, the public -private links need to be strengthened and the higher education system needs to be reoriented to refocus from supply- to demand.

There seems to be a belief that training and collecting degrees creates job opportunities in Sri Lanka.

However, this is not the case, since the training has not favoured the skills in technical subjects and to support the skills needs in the commercial sector, which is what is needed in Sri Lanka.

Training should be provided for first job entry instead for some skill upgrading for the unemployed.

Skills should not be valued based on the paper it is certified, but rather for what the person can deliver. Even at the university level of education the mismatch of skills demanded and supplied is so very obvious.

For instance, a huge amount of graduates are in civil engineering rather than in disciplines that are appropriate for industrial technology.

Textile engineers are the most relevant to the country’s main export, but in 2000 less than five percent of the university graduates had these skills.

The problems with the skills mismatch is exacerbated by the governmental education policies. Traditionally, the education has mainly been provided by the government since private schools have been considered as elitist and too expensive.

At the university level, the governmental monopoly has not worked well since it has not been able to keep up with global realities.

Then at vocational level, the monopoly has lead to a centralized training system that has not taken local conditions into account.

Therefore, the training should be managed by the private sector and the local industry in order to be more demand based and create a stronger linkage between the training system and the labour market.

The private firms, on the other hand, might be reluctant to invest in human capital development as they cannot be sure that the skilled worker they up skill will not leave for another company with higher wages even though good HR practices have found to work positively to help retention.

These problems could be solved by letting the government be the financier rather than the manager and private sector firms should be incentivised to provide education and training linked to the labour market.