Analysis of Future Demand for Sri Lankan ICT Undergraduates in ICT Industry: Mapping the ACM/IEEE Computing Degrees with Emerging Technologies

Sri Lanka is famous for its agricultural economy, but in recent years it is slowly shifting towards a knowledge-based economy. In a knowledge-based economy, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry plays a critical role in increasing productivity and economic growth. ICT includes communication technology, various multimedia applications, and services that enable users to access, retrieve, store, transmit and manipulate information in a digital form. This sector has generated numerous new job opportunities, led to increased export profits, and attracted international investors for investment. Present Sri Lankan ICT industry consists of over 600 companies. According to reports from the Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies, the demand for the ICT sector has increased in recent years. The increase in demand for the ICT sector led to the creation of many ICT job opportunities and open new ICT degree-awarding training institutes in Sri Lanka. Government universities, private degree awarding institutes, government vocational and tertiary training institutes, and private diploma and certificate awarding training institutes are major categories of them that offer various degree programs in ICT disciplines. As per SLASSCOM, there are fourteen job categories in the present-day ICT industry. Because of this reason undergraduates are unable to choose the most suitable ICT degree program according to the job demand. This research provides the solution for the above problem. The main objective of this research is to analyse the future demand for Sri Lankan ICT undergraduates in the ICT industry. Because of this study undergraduates can choose the ICT discipline according to the demand of the job market in the ICT industry. Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE) guidelines claims that all computing degrees are classified into seven major areas which are Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Cyber Security, Information System, Information Technology, Software Engineering and Data Science. The future demand for ICT graduates in the ICT industry is examined in this research based on these seven primary disciplines. The secondary data for this research were collected from the National IT-BPM workforce survey and the university grant commission website. According to the National IT-BPM workforce survey, cloud platform is the most demand technology in recent years. Finally, undergraduates can choose the best path in the ICT field by knowing the most demanding technologies in the ICT industry.