The unemployment rate along with the level and growth rate of employment is being used as an indicator of labour market conditions. While this indicator provides information about changes in the supply and demand for labour, it reveals nothing about the skills required by the private sector, the jobs and occupations in demand and industries in growing.

The individuals who would like to join labour market need information on what skills are necessary to successfully compete in the contemporary labour market, what the occupations in demand, what soft or managerial skills are mostly required for private sector jobs. All users of labour market information need more than a measure of demand for workers at a specific point in time. Further, to facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of the Sri Lankan labour market and to show how changes in labour supply and demand affect the overall economy, a new measure would be needed. Therefore, vacancy survey conducted by the labour market information unit of the ministry of labour relations and man power was introduced. This may be not perfectly reliable, but it is still valid to come to on judgment of the labour market of the behavior because the news paper advertisement would likely to be mostly preferred by the job seekers as a source of searching employment opportunities.

This vacancy survey is a continuous survey (started in 2005) of job advertisement from selected weekend newspaper (Sunday Observer, Sunday Times and Silumina) which the most of job vacancies are advertised. Through this survey information the Labour Market Information Unit monitors the number of new jobs opened or generated by the private sector organizations in occupational and industrial categories over the time by indicating changes in labour market tightness or changes in the degree of difficulty of hiring.

This report is to provide information on job vacancies that was available up to June 2008 since January 2008, characteristics of job vacancies and trends that will enhance empirical analysis of the economy and the labour market.

The job vacancy survey provides information to the job seekers with a broad view of which industries are hiring , which occupations are in demand and what education and experience levels are required and what are the soft or managerial are needed to be employed in the private sector. This report is a road map that could be used to determine what are the occupations are in demand and what level of education and experience are required which in turn individuals can tailor education training and work experience to suit future positions in high demand. For policy makers and researchers this report help as reference for information on current vacancies, seasonal vacancy trends, dominant industries, occupations in demand and their trends and level of education and skills which needed to effectively allocate resources to education, training and job placement programmes.

During the first six months (January to June) of year 2008, the private sector has generated 68038 number of new jobs for immediate hire. This is the highest number of vacancies recorded during every six month period (starting from January in each year) 2005.With compared to the period of July – December 2007, number of vacancies in January-June 2008 has increased by 67.8%.This increase may due to two main reasons.

First, the high turnover occurring in private organization.