Overview of GovTech Sri Lanka and Digital Capacity Building
Techie.Lk recently reached out to Chadika Yahampath at GovTech Sri Lanka, who leads initiatives focused on citizen capacity building, education transformation, and strengthening digital capabilities across the government sector, as the organization’s Head of Digital Capacity Building.
She worked previously at the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) and spearheaded the National Digital Strategy for Women’s Development (Suhuruliya 2.0), developed the District Digital Readiness Index (DDRI), and contributed to education and workforce transformation.
She was also a UN Women Cyber Fellow from 2022 to 2025 and contributed to global conversations on gender equality in cybersecurity.
From your experience, what is the biggest misconception we have about Sri Lanka’s digital/ICT skills shortage?
The biggest misconception is viewing the digital skills shortage purely as a quantitative gap rather than a qualitative one. A sustainable talent strategy requires balancing headcount targets with industry alignment.
According to the 2019 National IT-BPM Workforce Survey conducted by ICTA, the annual skills gap was projected at approximately 12,000 against an annual graduate output of around 9,000. Higher education institutions have since made commendable progress, scaling the estimated annual output to approximately 17,000 graduates.
However, given the rapid evolution of emerging technologies, traditional academic structures naturally face structural challenges in updating curricula at the same pace as global market demands. Addressing the skills shortage effectively requires looking beyond graduate numbers to focus on building a globally competitive, future-ready workforce.
Strengthening multi-stakeholder collaboration between government, academia, and industry will ensure curricula and practical training continuously align with evolving market standards.
Is the problem really a shortage of people with ICT qualifications, or is it a mismatch between what people are learning and what industry actually needs?
The IT employment landscape has evolved drastically since the 2019 National IT-BPM Workforce Survey, which highlighted a significant quantitative talent shortage. With the rapid integration of artificial intelligence and shifting work models, the critical bottleneck has moved from headcount to a widening quality mismatch.
Addressing this gap requires systemic action such as accelerating curriculum modernization, deepening industry–academia partnerships, establishing a national skills framework for standardization, and deploying targeted programs in advanced technology domains. GovTech is driving targeted interventions across these areas to help bridge the divide.
At the same time, personal initiative remains vital. Essential soft skills such as cross-functional teamwork, clear communication, and strong interpersonal abilities are now decisive factors in recruitment. Undergraduates must actively cultivate these human-centric competencies alongside their technical studies to ensure they graduate fully industry-ready.
What should the relationship between industry and academia look like if we want to produce graduates who are genuinely job-ready rather than simply qualification-ready?
Technology changes too fast for anyone to know what tools we will be using five years from now. Because of this, universities cannot just prepare students for one specific job. Instead, they need to teach them how to adapt to changes they cannot predict yet.
The problem is that traditional university courses take too long to update, so what students learn is often outdated before they even graduate.
Inviting an industry guest speaker once a month is helpful, but it does not fix this problem. We need deeper, ongoing collaboration such as industry experts helping design the courses, lecturers spending time working with companies, and students solving real-world business problems as part of their daily classes.
How can Sri Lanka build a system of continuous learning and reskilling rather than relying primarily on university education?
We need to introduce a national Skills Framework that clearly defines the capabilities industry expects at every level, helping individuals build their own targeted development plans. Traditional career guidance cannot keep up because technology changes too quickly. Continuous learning must become a standard habit across all career stages, and GovTech is actively examining initiatives to support this transition.
Today, knowledge is freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection it is no longer locked inside lecture halls. What truly matters now are practical skills and adaptability, and formal education alone cannot provide those. We must build an ecosystem that encourages people to continuously learn, unlearn, and reskill throughout their working lives.
What are the most important skills Sri Lankan workers need to develop over the next five years, aside from programming and traditional technical skills?
It is hard to predict exact job roles right now because AI is changing everything so quickly. We cannot say for sure which jobs will stay, which will be replaced, or what future workplaces will look like. Because of this uncertainty, the most critical skills are agility, adaptability, and change management. If professionals are flexible and ready to learn, they can easily adjust to whatever shifts the market throws at them.
With AI increasingly automating or transforming many entry-level technology tasks, should Sri Lanka be rethinking how it trains its next generation of ICT professionals?
AI easily takes over repetitive, entry-level tasks, which naturally opens up more room for humans to focus on higher-level, strategic work. Because of this shift, continuous upskilling and reskilling are essential. GovTech is stepping in to support this transition, but individuals cannot afford to wait for the government or companies to act. Staying relevant is ultimately a personal choice to keep learning, adopt these tools, and work more productively.
There is often a strong focus on producing software engineers, but what other categories of digital talent does Sri Lanka need if it wants to build a broader digital economy?
The digital economy is much broader than just the IT industry. Key sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing are all undergoing digital transformation, which means digital skills are needed everywhere not just by programmers. Our capacity building pillar focuses on equipping both the broader workforce and everyday citizens with digital skills. We don’t only need software engineers to build technology; we need capable, confident technology users across all industries, so the benefits of the digital economy reach everyone.
How significant is the digital skills divide between Colombo and the rest of Sri Lanka, and what are the biggest barriers preventing young people outside the Western Province from accessing technology careers?
The urban-rural digital divide is one of the biggest roadblocks to an inclusive digital economy. In the past, the tech industry was concentrated almost entirely in Colombo and the Western Province. Today, that is starting to change as regional tech companies, regional startup hubs, and remote work models give young people opportunities without forcing them to move to the capital. However, significant barriers remain. Quality tech education is still heavily centralized, and unequal access to infrastructure and resources continues to hold back talent in rural areas.
How can capacity-building programs be designed to reach women, rural communities and other groups that may have traditionally been excluded from Sri Lanka’s technology economy?
At GovTech, our capacity-building pillar is designed to ensure no one is left behind. We are introducing a competency framework for digital literacy and service adoption tailored specifically to women, persons with disabilities, youth, senior citizens, and marginalized groups.
To track and address regional disparities, the District Digital Readiness Index will map the urban-rural divide, while district-based committees will lead digital transformation at the local level. Inclusivity is at the very core of our capacity-building strategy to ensure technology benefits every citizen.
Sri Lanka produces a significant number of ICT graduates, yet many skilled professionals leave the country. How should skills development be approached in the context of the country’s brain drain issue?
Migration is ultimately a personal decision driven by many factors, but we can do a lot more to encourage talent to stay. If we build a supportive business environment where local tech companies can grow, they can offer competitive salaries, better perks, and flexible remote-working options. From a skills perspective, brain drain has created a severe vacuum in middle management. In the short term, our best solution is rapid upskilling and fast-track training for junior professionals so they can step up and fill these critical leadership gaps quickly.
How can we measure whether a national skills-development program has actually worked? Is the number of people training still a meaningful metric, or should we be looking at employment, income, entrepreneurship and productivity outcomes?
The number of people trained is no longer a meaningful measure of success. Real impact is about outcomes, not headcounts. Our programs aim to prepare the workforce for the tech sector, help citizens adopt digital services, and equip public servants to build citizen-centered digital systems.
Ultimately, true effectiveness should be measured by real-world indicators: The return on investment from our digital public infrastructure, higher digital inclusion and trust, and measurable progress on key global benchmarks such as the UN E-Government Development Index, the IMF AI Preparedness Index, the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
If you had the opportunity to redesign Sri Lanka’s national approach to digital skills and capacity building from the ground up, what are the three things you would change first?
We are actually in the middle of driving that redesign right now. Our national capacity-building strategy focuses directly on three core sub-pillars.
First, empowering citizens by expanding targeted training so people across all communities can confidently access and adopt digital public services.
Second, transforming the government sector by building digital competencies among public servants and modernizing state institutions to design and deliver citizen-centric digital services.
Third, driving talent and skills transformation to ensure our workforce develops the advanced technical and practical capabilities needed by the tech industry and the broader digital economy.
Rather than treating this as a theoretical redesign, we are actively implementing these changes on the ground today.