Factors affecting the Sri Lankan IT professionals' migration

Abstract

Information Technology (IT) is a fast-moving industry which can nurture in any country. As the IT competency is globally accepted, can be taught and somewhat standardized, there seem to be more migration opportunities available for the IT professionals. In an era where Sri Lanka is with the ambition to make the IT/BPM industry as the top strategic industry of the country, it is challenging to lose the existing IT workforce as a consequence of migration. Therefore this research intended to investigate the factors affecting the migration decision of the Sri Lankan IT professionals. As the first stage of the research, an extensive literature review was carried out to look through existing literature on migration and find out the universally identified factors that are affecting the decision to migrate. These factors were categorized as push and pull in the literature. Then conceptual framework was developed to visualize the literature review findings so as to have a better structuring of the research. The next stage was to collect the data related to the influential factors for migration decision of Sri Lankan IT professionals who are already migrated. An online survey was used for this data collection. The survey was designed with reference to the conceptual framework. The snowball sampling was used to reach out to potential survey respondents. The collected data was analyzed by utilizing the techniques of expert judgement and descriptive statistics. The Microsoft Excel and R software were used as the data analysis tools. As per the data analysis it was evident that pull factors are prominent compared to push factors in influencing the migration decision of Sri Lankan IT professionals. Finally, the initial conceptual framework was refined to reflect the data analysis outcomes. This research is only providing a generalization of the factors that affect the migration decision of overall population of Sri Lankan IT professionals. There is more room for the research on specific sub-populations as future work