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Wednesday, 11 December 2013 00:01 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Commercial Bank Chairman Dinesh Weerakkody speaking at the University of Kelaniya International Conference on Business and Information 2013 on ‘Human Resource Challenges for Sri Lanka’ said that in the past five years the country has made great strides on many fronts, especially in education. However Sri Lankan universities, due to limited intake capacity, by default only open their doors to the top 5% that sit for the Advanced Level exams. The majority joins the work force. Also around 10% pursue their high-education in foreign universities or their satellite branches in Sri Lanka and enroll into professional qualifications in accounting, finance, management and marketing. These are mainly professional British qualifications like Chartered Institute of Management Accounting, Chartered Institute of Marketing and Association of Chartered Certified Accountants.
Therefore as a country we need a strategy to successfully move our young people from education to employment and we need to scale up our interventions for maximum impact because there are many different views among the stake holders on how are young people should be made ready to succeed in entry level positions. As a result of this mismatch education to employment highway has become very messy. Therefore education reform must find way to focus our youth from becoming mere certificate collectors and refocus them to acquire skills and competencies that are needed to deliver on the job.
Vocational training
Weerakkody pointed out that in successful export economies the training provided by VTIs jointly to upgrade the skills of their work force has been crucial, since high-level skills are essential for manufacturing related activities. But while vocational training is widely recognised as important, such training is rarely cost-efficient when provided by the state systems.
Most firms therefore prefer to do their own training, partly because many skills are company specific. There is ample research to show that the return on the training investment is higher in industries that engage well-educated workers and also in environments where there is rapid technological change.
Singapore’s use of training to promote the information technology sector through a concerted program that involved educational institutions, providing training subsidies to schools and office workers, and digitising of the civil service, helped the country to achieve leadership in technology related services.
This success illustrates the importance of a government’s ability to foresee a major opportunity and then promote public-private partnership to invest in human capital formation. However, to make it a success, Weerakkody pointed out that businesses must also stand ready to take advantages of the support the Government is willing to provide to promote human capital formation. In addition, the state must ensure that they maintain the per student share, in real terms, of government funding education.
Weerakkody in conclusion observed that since the country’s university education is only limited to the brightest students in the country, the universities need to work very closely with industry to improve syllabi and the facilities to ensure that the country’s brightest students are instilled with the skills and knowledge the country needs so that they can make a meaningful contribution.
