On a request by the Policy Development Office of The Prime Minister’s Office Sri Lanka’s Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) has conducted the first ever survey on the labor demand in the country in 2017.
The island wide survey supported by the International Labor Organization (ILO) aimed to identify the demand for employment requiring different skills and formulate appropriate policies related to education and vocational training in the country.
The survey covered a sample of 3500 establishments covering the entire country. All the establishments and enterprises with more than 3 employees in the private sector was considered as the targeted population of the survey.
The main objective of this survey was to identify the occupations which are highly demanded by the private sector of the country and to estimate the demand in numbers. Apart from that it included the data regarding current employment profile, challenges of working with newly hired employees, the number of vacancies at present and expected number of vacancies to be filled within the next twelve months in the country.
With regards to this labor demand survey, a Data Dissemination Workshop was held on 29th June 2018 at the Department of Census and Statistics with the participation of number of important stakeholders in Sri Lanka, the Policy Development Office said.
Through this workshop DCS explained how those national statistics in labor demand are significant to the employers, decision makers and the national policy makers and how these statistics can be used to reduce the gap between demand of labor and supply of labor.
Currently, many steps are being taken to inform the significance of this survey to the Ministry of Education and The Committee of Technical, Vocational and Educational, Training (TVET) with the intervention of The Policy Development Office of The Prime Minister’s Office.
The full report of the survey is available at DCS website.
