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Monday, October 31, 2005
MCCI to increase labor for call centers, BPOs
Concerned with the information that some contact centers in Cebu are already hiring employees from other provinces like Iloilo and Davao, the Mandaue Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) has initiated a program that will refute speculations that Cebu is short of manpower for the budding contact center industry.
“We have the manpower. The raw material is there but they lack awareness of the opportunities that await them in the industry. This is why the industry is not able to attract the good and qualified people,” MCCI vice president for external affairs Ema Rama told a press conference at the Metro Café Ayala Thursday.
Business leaders in Cebu have been calling on the academe to strengthen its English speaking proficiency training to be able to produce graduates who are qualified to work in the contact center industry, as the human resource for the industry in Cebu is already “drying up.”
She said the chamber has been conducting discussions with schools and universities in the province to create awareness, not only on the call center industry but on the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry as a whole, in the academe and among the teachers.
The chamber hopes the teachers will, in turn, inform their students of the prospects and opportunities of working in the industry.
“We want our qualified graduates and their parents as well, to know that what some people say, that a call center agent is just a glorified telephone operator, is not true. No. There is a career path in the industry,” Ramas said.
She said some contact centers provide their employees with friendly working environments, such as providing them free flowing coffee and tea and game areas, where they could play billiards, among others, to temporarily divert their mind from the pressures of work.
Aside from creating awareness on the benefits of working in the industry, MCCI also discussed with the academe possible changes in their curriculum for them to be able to produce graduates who will be prepared to work with the BPO industry.
BPO is the transfer of a process or a function that is not the core business of a company to an organization that has the expertise of such function.
Forecast
“BPO is now part of a standard economic ecosystem between developed and developing countries,” Taft IT (information technology) marketing services manager Elvira Torres quoted neoIT, an outsourcing consultancy firm.
BPO includes accounting services, human resource administration and hiring, contact center, data transcription, computer graphics and animation and engineering design services.
Torres said that according to the McKinsey and Co. forecast, the BPO industry market would reach $180 billion in 2010. At present, only an estimated 10 percent of the world’s business processes are being outsourced. This means that 90 percent is still untapped.
These forecasts, coupled with the belief that Cebu has the qualified manpower, have encouraged the MCCI to include in its advocacies the BPO industry awareness program.
MCCI is now offering free English speaking proficiency training to college graduates, Torres said.
The training is meant to establish a pool of qualified manpower so that Cebu could immediately supply human resource to call center operators or BPO firms that plan to expand their operations in the province, she said.
With regard to infrastructure, Cebu is ready to accommodate the growth of the industry because more IT parks are now developed, such as the newly developed Taft IT Zone in the Mandaue Reclamation area. (JBN)
(October 31, 2005 issue)
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