ASIDE from equipping Filipinos with vocational skills one of Cebu’s pioneer business process management (BPM) firms, is urging local government units (LGU) to also extend support in reskilling Filipinos for them to land jobs in today’s “new age of work.”
While various BPM firms have been creative in recruiting individuals to join the industry, Franklin Pasayloon, senior site director of Sykes Synergis, in a press conference Wednesday, April 17, said the way they hire employees now has also evolved from an individual-based approach to a more targeted one.
He said gone are the days when companies just waited for whoever walked in to apply for a job in the BPM industry; now they go community-based talent pooling to search for specific skills sets needed in the industry.
“Now we identify specific groups to provide us these high-value services,” said Pasayloon.
Kris Villaba, senior site director of Sykes-Robinsons Galleria, added they are now even hiring part-timers with specific skill sets to help them deliver the requirements of their clients.
“We are now searching for certain demographics, not only courses,” she said. This as new BPM clients move from requiring outsourcing firms to deliver the traditional services to managing the whole value chain of the customer journey.
Data labeling, machine learning and robotics are the new skills that are in demand in the BPM industry. Pasayloon said clients now seek outsourcing companies that can handle high-skill tasks.
While companies implement strategies on their own to meet the demands of their clients, they see the LGUs and the academe playing a significant role in helping them sustainably meet the clients’ expectations, Pasayloon noted.
He said the challenge now is how to get the academe and the LGU to work together to also equip Filipinos to do more complex tasks aside from providing them vocational trainings.
Sykes is the co-presenter of this year’s Transformation Summit. This one-day summit happening on May 6, 2019 at Summit Galleria Hotel is anchored on the theme: “Change By Choice.”
According to Wilfredo Sa-a Jr., managing director of Cebu Information Technology-BPM Organization (CIB.O), the theme is timely for Cebu as the companies here are now in the various stages of digital transformation.
“Our theme is Change by Choice because we see that if we continue with the usual things we have been doing, we will most likely be left behind. We are seeing the industry headed towards the high-value services,” he said.
Some 275 top-level executives, managers and industry leaders are expected to join the summit.
Change in job tasks
The Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) sees a major shift in job roles in the IT-BPM industry.
CCAP president Jojo Uligan earlier said job roles have now shifted from low-level-skill tasks to mid-skill and high-skill tasks as the new wave of the industrial revolution shakes the landscape of the global IT-BPM industry.
“It is common knowledge in our industry that we have already been implementing changes in job tasks and descriptions to cope with the evolving requirements,” said Uligan.
In a previous analysis by industry consultant Frost and Sullivan, tasks that require basic skills (low-level) in the global BPM landscape are projected to decline by 29 percent by 2022. At the same time, mid-skill jobs are expected to rise by 12 percent, while positions that require higher skills are projected to jump by 19 percent.
From the traditional focus, which is customer services delivery, Uligan said the contact center sector is now geared towards an emerging priority—customer experience delivery.
He said the firms now prioritize quick and accurate resolution, personalized interactions, the self-service option, interaction in customers’ preferred channel and seamless/consistent experience.
Disruptive technologies also point to automation, analytics and artificial intelligence to meet delivery of customer experience.
“Mid- and high-skill jobs are getting more demand in our industry. Our professionals are now finding themselves more engaged in complicated tasks that require experience or specialized expertise paired with abstract reasoning and situational response/autonomy,” Uligan explained.
Based on results of an internal research by CCAP, mid- and high-skill jobs in the contact center sector account for 85 percent of positions, which is higher than the projection made by Frost and Sullivan that about 73 percent of the global IT-BPM industry will be covering mid- and high-skill jobs by 2022. (KOC)