Thursday, August 21, 2008 Partnership pushed to thrive in BPO
CEBU’S educators and entrepreneurs will have to work better as partners to help the local economy thrive in business process outsourcing, an industry projected to generate US$130 billion by 2010.
“The same key drivers of the industry are our own challenges: talent, business environment and new sites for expansion,” said Oscar Sañez, chief executive officer of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), in the Sun.Star Economic Forum yesterday at Parklane International Hotel.
“Our inability to meet these challenges can seriously affect our competitiveness,” he said.
Outsourcing and off-shoring (O&O) in the Philippines drew US$5 billion into the economy in 2007, from only $1.5 billion in 2004.
Target: 10% by 2010
Industry players in the Philippines have set a target of $13 billion—about 10 percent of the projected global market—by
2010.
To do that, the BPAP set a target of 290,000 to 560,000 qualified graduates nationwide from 2007-2010. This, however, will require improvements in the general education system, which currently loses up to a quarter of its pupils between Grades 2 and 3 because families can’t afford to send the children to school.
“Talent is our number one concern,” Sañez said in an interview. “The others are easy, because things like facilities, infrastructure, offices, telecommunications support—they’re all there, and the private sector has been aggressive.
Government in Cebu has been very supportive of IT too, whether it’s the Provincial or the City Government.”
One of the factors behind Cebu’s success, said Sañez, is the leadership that the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for IT (CEDF-IT) has taken in “collaborative work” with industry associations, such as BPAP, in attracting investments.
Reshaping lives
Lower labor costs compared to that of Metro Manila and the presence of 21 IT parks and buildings have also enabled Cebu to attract O&O investors.
At least 16,000 currently work in 52 O&O companies in Cebu, majority of them call centers, but representatives of the academe also brought up the need to study the industry’s social costs.
Dr. Fiscalina Nolasco, who teaches sociology and anthropology at the University of San Carlos, raised during the workshop the need for statistics to verify anecdotal evidence on how working for BPOs has “reshaped the lives of our young people.”
How are relations within families, for example, affected when more workers take on night-shift jobs? “What types of familial tensions occur?” asked Nolasco.
“Innovation is good. Opportunities are good,” she said. “But we also need to explore the links between economic
development and various aspects of culture.”
Sañez said the industry is open to working with academe in order to study how young graduates can better prepare themselves for the industry, and how employers can curb its high attrition rates. Some call centers lose up to 40 percent of their employees in a year, although Sañez also pointed out that of this figure, only 18 percent leave the industry for good.
The others “move around, trying to get the best deal,” he said.
One way the industry can help the academe is by letting them know what skills would have enabled “near-hires” to join the industry, as well as by developing standard competency tests that can be woven into the college curriculum.
“What we need is to be able to ramp up the quality of our college graduates here,” said Sañez. “I’m encouraging Cebu to strongly develop the partnership between the universities and the BPO companies. It should be a mutually beneficial partnership, where the industry can help the universities develop their curriculum, train their teachers and maybe support them with programs, even software, so that their graduates will be ready to be hired from day one.” (IDA)
