Employability and Related Context Prediction Framework for University Graduands: A Machine Learning Approach

In Sri Lanka (SL), graduands’ employability remains a national issue due to the increasing number of graduates produced by higher education institutions each year. Thus, predicting the employability of university graduands can mitigate this issue since graduands can identify what qualifications or skills they need to strengthen up in order to find a job of their desired field with a good salary, before they complete the degree. The main objective of the study is to discover the plausibility of applying machine learning approach efficiently and effectively towards predicting the employability and related context of university graduands in Sri Lanka by proposing an architectural framework which consists of four modules; employment status prediction, job salary prediction, job field prediction and job relevance prediction of graduands while also comparing performance of classification algorithms under each prediction module. Series of machine learning algorithms such as C4.5, Naïve Bayes and AODE have been experimented on the Graduand Employment Census - 2014 data. A pre-processing step is proposed to overcome challenges embedded in graduand employability data and a feature selection process is proposed in order to reduce computational complexity. Additionally, parameter tuning is also done to get the most optimized parameters. More importantly, this study utilizes several types of Sampling (Oversampling, Undersampling) and Ensemble (Bagging, Boosting, RF) techniques as well as a newly proposed hybrid approach to overcome the limitations caused by the class imbalance phenomena. For the validation purposes, a wide range of evaluation measures was used to analyze the effectiveness of applying classification algorithms and class imbalance mitigation techniques on the dataset. The experimented results indicated that RandomForest has recorded the highest classification performance for 3 modules, achieving the selected best predictive models under hybrid approach having an area under the ROC curve interpretation as an ‘Excellent’ experiment, while a C4.5 Decision Tree model under Ensemble approach has been selected as the best model of the remaining module (Salary Prediction module)

A Study on the Waiting Time for the First Employment of Arts Graduates in Sri Lanka

Transition from tertiary level education to employment is one of the challenges that many fresh university graduates face after graduation. The transition period or the waiting time to obtain the first employment varies with the socio-economic factors and the general characteristics of a graduate. Compared to other fields of study, Arts graduates in Sri Lanka, have to wait a long time to find their first employment. The objective of this study is to identify the determinants of the transition from higher education to employment of these graduates using survival models. The study is based on a survey that was conducted in the year 2016 on a stratified random sample of Arts graduates from Sri Lankan universities who had graduated in 2012. Among the 469 responses, 36 (8%) waiting times were interval censored and 13 (3%) were right censored. Waiting time for the first employment varied between zero to 51 months. Initially, the log-rank and the Gehan-Wilcoxon tests were performed to identify the significant factors. Gender, ethnicity, GCE Advanced level English grade, civil status, university, class received, degree type, sector of first employment, type of first employment and the educational qualifications required for the first employment were significant at 10%. The Cox proportional hazards model was fitted to model the waiting time for first employment with these significant factors. All factors, except ethnicity and type of employment were significant at 5%. However, since the proportional hazard assumption was violated, the lognormal Accelerated failure time (AFT) model was fitted to model the waiting time for the first employment. The same factors were significant in the AFT model as in Cox proportional model