Finding the most suitable job according to one’s qualifications and capabilities is a dream
of the youth. Yet, it is noticed that this is not an easy task due to a variety of reasons such
as complexity of advertisements, time limitations in getting firsthand information on
vacancies, diversity of vacancy appearing modes etc. Hence most youth end up in
spending their time unsuccessfully in searching for job opportunities or accepting sub
optimal job positions. With the advancement of technology, the modes of advertising of job
vacancies have changed and the World Wide Web (www) has become the most dynamic
job advertising mode.
Labour Market Information (LMI) bulletin published bi-annually by the Technical and
Vocational Education Commission (TVEC) is a good source of information for job seekers,
which is a systematic collection of job vacancies on the labour market requirements in Sri
Lanka. The main and primary source of data collection for the LMI Bulletin is the manual
search of newspaper advertisements carried out by the Information System Division of
TVEC since 1999. This has become an obsolete method and a Web Based Labour Market
Observatory System (LMOS) was developed that operates as a back end system to capture
job market information from the www for the LMI bulletin and it can act as a portal for job
market vacancies from the user point of view. The LMOS is able to rank the vacancies
according to the user requirement and contain aggregated information from other sites such
as topjobs.lk, ikman.lk and ikmanjob.lk. These are value added features of the LMOS
system compared to other job advertising sites.
LMOS has three (03) user categories namely jobseeker, employer (company) and the
admin (TVEC) depending on the role played. A jobseeker can register with the system and
upload his/her Curriculum Vitae (CV) and search the system for job vacancies based on
job category, location, salary and with more details such as qualifications, and
programming languages known. A registered employer can make a request to upload new
vacancies and can view the CVs for potential candidates. Admin has the authoritative
power in uploading new vacancies and generating reports for the LMI bulletin.
The system operates based on two main processes, namely, web extract process and user
search process. In the web extracting process, the LMOS mines the selected job
advertising sites and extracts data by filtering the relevant using web content mining
techniques as per the user request. For registered job seekers, an email alert is sent when
a matching job is captured by the system. The system evaluation is done by two sets of
users, one by the TVEC and the other by the system users through two separate
questionnaires. The TVEC was highly satisfied with the new simplified mechanism for
capturing online advertised jobs for the LMI bulletin and job seekers found the LMOS as a
time saver for being a job vacancy portal and email alerts were a very appealing feature of
the system.
Keywords: www, labour market observatory system
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