Bridging the gap: an nlp-based comparative analysis of commerce stream degree and professional qualification curricula in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Selecting a suitable career path is a challenging task for students in Sri Lanka, particularly after the Advanced Level Examination. The student has multiple choices, like pursuing a degree at state universities, professional qualifications, or non-state universities. These decisions are influenced by their cultural backgrounds, peers' opinions, and a lack of knowledge about the skills needed for their desired jobs in the market. This can create a mismatch between the skills that the graduates have, and the skills required by the employers. This study systematically analyses 598 modules from eight state university accounting and finance degrees and compares them with 128 modules from six professional accounting programs. The aim is to identify the similarities, gaps, and opportunities for better alignment. Utilizing Natural Language Processing techniques, especially the Sentence-BERT tool, this study analyzed the module names, descriptions of programs for content similarity, thematic relevance, and alignment with the skills needed in the accounting job market with extracted from 20 job postings. Our analysis reveals that professional programs cover about 92% of the necessary technical and soft skills, while university curricula address only 8%, which derived from semantic skill tag matching, where each module was compared with industry skills using SBERT based similarity scoring. This study offers a roadmap to guide students in making informed choices about their educational paths, based on their career goals.