‘Boom in finance jobs as a result of economic changes’

With the US dollar to Sri Lankan rupee exchange rate touching an all time high of 153, the Sri Lankan economy is going through major changes.

One of the primary causes for depreciation of the rupee has been the widening trade deficit.

The government on its part has been enacting reforms such as the changes in the VAT act in late 2016 with a goal to increasing revenue and decreasing public deficit.

Such reforms affect all businesses in the country. Consequently, one profession that is booming due to these economic changes is finance. According to the quarterly career report published by everjobs.lk, the accounting and finance job category has the highest number of vacancies and attracted the most number of job applications during the past three months.

Accounting and finance is closely followed by IT in terms of job creation and job applications. This is evident from the fact that ‘data entry’ and ‘IT’ were among the most searched for jobs on everjobs.lk during the months of April, May and June 2017.

The IT industry’s goal is to achieve US$ 5 billion in exports by 2022, creating 200,000 jobs and helping 2,000 tech start-ups. Sri Lanka was ranked 12th in the world by IBM for business process outsourcing.

The Sri Lankan BPO industry attracts Fortune 500 customers such as Google, J.P. Morgan & Co, Microsoft, Emirates and Qatar Airways.

“Although finance is and will continue to be one of the core functions of any company, there is still a shortage of quality financial professionals in the country,” explains Rushabh Sheth, Managing Director at everjobs.lk. “However I believe that this trend is temporary and Sri Lanka’s future lies in IT. We produce some of the top software engineers from colleges such as the University of Moratuwa who are highly competitive at a global level. With the booming BPO industry, needless to say, IT and software engineers are some of the most in-demand talent in the job market and we will see this trend continuing in the future.”

The job market, however, experienced a shift in terms of the most desirable professions among jobseekers during the second quarter of 2017. While HR-related jobs were the most attractive positions to professionals throughout 2016, internships and trainee jobs were highly sought after in Q2 2017. This is predominantly due to the fact that students are realizing the need for training to be competitive in the current job market.