12 February 2016 09:52 am
Salaries of Sri Lanka’s IT and Business Process Management (BOM) sectors at the entry level have seen an uptick, a survey by an international professionals’ services company said.
According to a compensation and benefit survey carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) on the country’s IT sector, salaries at entry level on average witnessed a higher rate of increase in comparison to those at senior positions.
“... budgeted estimates for 2016 indicate likelihood of witnessing further upward movement of these pay levels,” a SLASSCOM statement quoting the survey said.
Sri Lanka Association of Software and Service Companies is the national chamber for the IT/BPM industry in Sri Lanka.
The survey was published as a benchmarking report on behalf of SLASSCOM.
“As local companies have endeavored to grow, we have witnessed what can be perceived as a demand-led escalation in entry level graduate salaries for mainstream business areas such as software engineering and quality assurance within the IT sector,” the statement said.
According to the survey, the BPM sector in particular is noted to have been promoting career opportunities amongst a younger audience and promoting opportunities to fast-track entry into the industry talent pool.
Interestingly, these findings come at a time when fears are looming that the proposed Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) with India could flood Sri Lanka’s IT sector with cheap labour from India.
“Having a look at the skill requirement, areas such as Infrastructure Engineering, Information Security, PHP, Hyperion and Application Engineering have been reported as high demand areas of specialization within the IT sector whilst Finance and Accounting skills continue to be primary skills in wide demand within the BPM sector. Looking forward, discussions with industry stakeholders have identified legal process outsourcing (LPO) as a potential new growth segment receiving renewed interest and possibly an area for inclusion in future benchmarking studies,” the statement said.