An Investigation of Fitness of the Non-Technical Skills of Information Technology Graduates Produced by State Universities in Sri Lanka with the Industry Requirements

Abstract

This exploratory research is targeted to find the fitness of only non-technical or soft skills, but not the technical or hard skills of the target group because, a recent survey conducted by the world bank states “Sri Lanka’s workforce lacks critical job-specific skills that are in high demand, threatening the country’s sustained economic growth”[9]. The same report further includes “When deciding the employability of the graduates there are several skills that one needs to pay their attention such as Communication skills, Problem Solving, Team working, Planning and Organizing, Self-management and Technological Skills”[9]. Also the top management in IT industry emphasizes this issue of lack of soft skills especially among the IT graduates those who are passed out from government universities than from private and other institutes in Sri Lanka. Keeping these two matters in mind the problem statement of this research is composed. Therefore initially the research boundary was limited to IT graduates those who are passed out from government universities and also those graduates selected as those who have joined the industry during last two years as, after two years of working experience most of them get upgraded based on their environment. Based on the research requirement at the stage of preparation ten most wanted soft skills are selected for the study with reference to Johnson 2011[10] and key performance indicators of IT industry. Ten IT firms were selected from more than three hundred Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing companies in Sri Lanka using convenient random sampling method. Two parties were selected to collect required data from those IT firms. Those two parties are IT graduates newly recruited to the IT industry from state Universities in Sri Lanka with the sample size of two hundred and seventy eight and forty superiors or managers of those IT graduates by using random and snow ball sampling technique.