Features
Aligning graduate output with labour market needs:Why national policy intervention essential
The lack of a committed and competent workforce is no longer a routine managerial complaint in Sri Lanka; it has become a defining national problem. Recent widely reported malpractices, in leading public institutions, have exposed the depth of this challenge. From a macro-economic perspective, large and persistent gaps exist between the competencies required to perform jobs effectively and the competency profiles of the existing workforce. The consequences are visible across the economy; we witness the key economic drivers, such as agriculture, energy, tourism, finance, and education, continue to underperform. This chronic condition is not a result of insufficient and incapable human capital, but of its persistent misalignment and misutilisation.
Economic development in any country is ultimately driven by the quality and relevance of human capital deployed within its key industries. In Sri Lanka, however, the education sector, particularly higher education, has been repeatedly criticised for its limited role in producing graduates, aligned with economic needs. This misalignment is often justified by higher education institutions on the grounds that their role is not to train graduates for specific jobs, but to produce broadly capable individuals who can perform in any work context. This position appears defensible in principle. Nevertheless, it remains problematic in practice, when economic sectors continue to underperform, and graduates struggle to find productive and relevant employment.
We were surprised to see a large number of university graduates appear at a recruitment interview for post of office labourer. Their intention was to secure a public sector job as a career path, nothing else. Alas, in another job placement interview, to select office clerks, several candidates presented degree qualifications, in statistics, and degree programmes, like archeology and geography, although a degree was not an entry requirement. When questioned, the common response was the difficulty of finding jobs, relevant to their degrees. Does this mean university degrees are worthless? Certainly not, if strategically channelled into relevant economic drivers, they could have contribute meaningfully to national development. For instance, an archeology degrees can be directed to tourism, heritage management, city planning, or spatial development. The tragedy is neither the policymakers, nor the university authorities bother about the time and money spent on graduates, which go in vein in an inappropriate job. No one bothers to assess the value of having such graduates directly channelled to relevant economic sectors. The graduates also may not be bothered to question the value they dilute in generic jobs.
Periodically, state university graduates, particularly those qualified through external degree programmes, flock to the streets, demanding government employment. In response, successive governments absorbed large numbers of graduates as school teachers and development officers. Whether such recruitment exercises were grounded in a systematic analysis of labour market demand, and sector-specific competency requirements, is dubious. The persistent deterioration in productivity and service quality, across key economic sectors, therefore, raises a fundamental question: Does strategic alignment between graduate output and labour market demand exist?
Systemic Weaknesses across Economic Sectors
We see deep structural weaknesses in nearly all segments of the Sri Lankan economy. Persistent deficiencies in public sector management; outdated agriculture management systems, relying on raw exports, weak preservation and production practices; structurally underdeveloped, unattractive tourism sector slow to adopt modern global approaches; an education system, from early childhood to higher education, showing more decline than progress; and digitalisation and e-governance initiatives repeatedly undermined by implementation failures, are some lapses to mention here.
However, during the colonial period, Sri Lanka was a prosperous country in terms of agro-economy and infrastructure development. During this period, conscious alignment between education and economic priorities was clearly visible. Schools taught subjects relevant to employment and livelihood opportunities, within the prevailing economic structure. Universities were primarily producing personnel to meet the clerical needs of the administration. University enrolment remained limited and targeted, ensuring graduate output remained broadly commensurate with labour market demand. The clarity of policies and orderly execution resulted in comparatively high employee–job fit, highly competent workforce, and better service and minimal graduate unemployment. Nevertheless, during the 76 years of post-independence, Sri Lanka has fallen from its economic stability and administrative orderliness, with rising problems in every sphere of economic, cultural, social, political and environmental segments.
Decoupling of Higher Education and Economic Needs
As we see with the expansion of higher education, graduate–job fit has gradually weakened. Both public and private higher education providers continue to offer academic programmes that are decoupled from economic development priorities. If I may bring an example, one of the most critical constraints to development in Sri Lanka is the persistent absence of timely and accurate data. Decisions, policies, and reforms frequently encounter implementation difficulties due to judgments based on outdated or inaccurate data. Organisations continue to operate in the absence of reliable information systems, admitting failures and presenting excuses. Notwithstanding the need, limited attention has been given to producing competent graduates, specialised in statistics, data analytics, and information management. National-level interventions to address this gap remain minimal, despite the urgent need for such expertise, within key government institutions, and the overall industry. A large number of agriculture degree holders pass out every year from state universities, but insufficient progress has been made in modernising agricultural products and value chains, although the agricultural sector is a key economic driver in the country. We often meet agricultural graduates holding general administrative positions, which are supposed to be handled by the management graduates. Agricultural specialised knowledge is underutilised, despite the potential to deploy this expertise in promoting agricultural development. It is noteworthy to consider that when graduates, trained in specific disciplines, enter irrelevant job markets, their competencies gradually erode, organisational performance declines, and additional costs are imposed on both organisations and the wider economy.
Misalignment of human capital constitutes a significant negative externality to national development. The government invests substantial public funds, generated through taxation, to provide free education with the expectation that graduates will contribute meaningfully to economic and social development. When graduates are misaligned in the job market, the resulting costs are borne by the economy and society at large. Consequently, the economy suffers from an absence of appropriate competencies, skills, and work attitudes. Poor judgments arising from capacity deficiencies, performance inefficiencies, and a lack of specialised human capital, generate externalities.
Why Strategic Alignment Matters
A clear and coherent national human capital development policy is required, to ensure strategic alignment with national economic drivers. Such a policy should be formulated by the government, through structured consultation with government institutions, public and private higher education providers, industry representatives across key economic sectors, as well as stakeholders from social groups, and environmental authorities. Universities should ensure that degree programmes are explicitly linked to sector-specific labour market demand, based on objective and systematic analysis rather than ad hoc decision-making. National competency frameworks, for major job categories, should be developed to guide curriculum design and enrolment planning. Of course, there are competency frameworks developed as initiatives of the governments time to time, but the issue is although policies were made, they were displaced, and still to search for.
Countries that have achieved rapid economic development consistently demonstrate strong strategic alignment between human capital development and policy initiatives, underscoring the importance of coordinated planning between education systems and national economic objectives. Singapore, for example, closely aligns higher education planning with labour market demand through initiatives, such as graduate employment surveys and industry-focused programmes. Universities, like the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, play a vital role in such initiatives.
It is important for us to explore the strategies of the other countries and benchmark best practices, adopting to the local context. If we, at least, take this need seriously, and plan, in the long term, strategic alignment between graduate output and labour market demand could fundamentally change Sri Lanka’s development outcomes. Where alignment exists, productivity improves, service delivery strengthens, and institutional accountability becomes unavoidable. Effective utilisation of discipline-specific graduates would curb skill erosion and reduce the recurring fiscal cost of graduate underemployment, misallocation and ad hoc public sector recruitment.
The Role of the Government and Policymakers
Policymakers must treat human capital development as a strategic mechanism, maintaining explicit alignment between higher education planning, economic development priorities, and labour market absorption capacity. Fragmented policy stewardship across ministries and agencies should be reduced through coordinated human capital governance mechanisms. Public administration, including sector-level managers, must actively articulate medium and long-term competency requirements of key economic drivers, and feed these requirements into higher education policy processes. Governments should shift from ad hoc graduate absorption practices towards planned workforce deployment strategies, ensuring that graduate output is absorbed into sectors where national productivity, innovation, and service delivery gains are most needed. In this effort, continuous policy dialogue, between education authorities, economic planners, and industry stakeholders, is essential to prevent symbolic alignment of graduate outputs while functional mismatches persist, if we aim for a prosperous nation.
Dr. Chani Imbulgoda (PhD) is a Senior Education Administrator, author, researcher, and lecturer with extensive experience in higher education governance and quality
assurance. She can be reached at cv5imbulgoda@gmail.com.
By Dr. Chani Imbulgoda
It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.
As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.
However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.
The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.
However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.
A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.
There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.
At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.
When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.
Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.
As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.
However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.
However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.
The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.
Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.
Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.
Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.
It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.
In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.
The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.
This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.
Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone
Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.
One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.
Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.
Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.
Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.
Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha
Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”
Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”
Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.
Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.
According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.
Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.
With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.
The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026
A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.
Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.
The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.
Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.
Launching the first round of auditions
The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.
Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.
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