TALENT pool in the Information and Technology (IT)–Business Process Management (BPM) sector is always there, in fact, it continues to increase by folds yearly.
But IT-BPM players are still stuck in the question if they are really qualified.
The continuing battle of industry players remains to be on how to meet present demand of qualified work force.
With the ever-evolving business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, the present trend now is that investors are looking for talents, who are qualified for Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) and language specialization.
Samuel Matunog, president of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Davao Inc. said, in an interview with SunStar Davao last Friday, June 9, at the Marco Polo Hotel-Davao, BPO firms now are no longer looking just for English speaking agents but also basing now for technical knowledge and language specification such as Japanese, Spanish and German.
Matunog said that there is indeed a huge talent pool that can be tapped in the city but the challenge is how to turn those into qualified human resources responding to the present market demand.
In a previous report, he cited that HP needs 2,000 talents, which are math graduates and has double courses of physics, computer science, and accounting.
He also added that a Cebu-based BPO firm is doing inquiries in the city and initially needs talents, which can speak German because of the company’s clients.
In addressing this setback, Matunog said, it will take time to produce such talents.
“Extensive training shall be in place. We can’t do shortcuts, we should invest in training our talents,” Matunog said.
He said education system plays a vital role.
“Now with K to 12, our long term solution is for all the schools offering IT-related courses is the revamping and reforming of the present curriculum pursuant to the Commission on Higher Education’s (Ched)’s memorandum dubbed as ‘outcome-based education’,” he added.
At present, some educational institutions here already completed the inputs, these are the University of Mindanao, University of Southeastern Philippines and the Holy Cross of Davao College.
“This long term reforms will bring light to the challenge that we are facing at the moment, but one thing is for sure it will take time,” he said adding that they are now undergoing training under the Philippine Information and Computing Accreditation Board as ICT industry assessors on the quality of the programs offered by the schools.
Indeed, in order for our talents to be qualified in this ever-changing industry one must have a good grasp in Mathematics, Science, communications and must be also creative as having only English-speaking skills, this time, no longer can be an edge.