Employing 230,000 employees and producing $3.5 billion in 2006, the Philippines is a top contender in the race to become the world’s premiere outsourcing destination. Despite that, the industry leaders are calling for measures to assure that its talent pool can sustain the surge in demand. At this point, the call center industry (which probably hires 90 % of all BPO employees) is finding out that hiring new employees is not as easy as it used to, despite that perks and higher than usual starting salaries that they offer. This is reportedly due to the low talent pool of phone communicators who are skilled in English. Of course, the country’s huge number of new graduates every year provides a fresh batch of candidates, enabling the call centers to fill the demand. However, the message is very clear. The country needs to strengthen its English curriculum.
In my opinion, I partially agree with the industry leaders’ observation. A lot of applicants are not accepted, not because they don’t know how to communicate in English but because they don’t sound like Americans. Interviews with call center agents revealed that applicants are hired based on their largely for their ability to sound like Americans. This is understandable since the clients that the call center agents will be talking to are Americans and naturally, they will be suspicious of foreign based and/or foreign sounding operators.
However, I also believe that the country has a huge talent pool waiting to be fully utilized. The Philippines has large number of college graduates who can skillfully do BPO work other than being call center agents.
At this point, a handful of companies are successfully doing book keeping, accounting, CAD, engineering and architectural works, legal process outsourcing, medical transcription, data entry, IT, animation, online customer service, etc.. If only more companies will specialize in those fields, the country has more than enough number of people who can accomplish the task.
3 comments:
hm, interesting, I make a small research at RentAcoder.com site (one of the biggest sites for telecommuting work), pls take a look at what I get trying to find "web design" providers at different countries:
Romania - 704 service providers (Population 22,317,730)
Ukraine - 197 service providers (Population 48,396,470)
Philippines 84 service providers (Population 87,857,473)
yes, its only one site and it may not give you a really clear picture, but still I think you can get idea about current trands - amount of Phillipines-based web developers is much lower comparing with competitors from other countries. hope something will change it the future ;-)
Hi Alek,
Thanks for the inputs and the kind words. I also hope that more people from lesser developed economies will be able to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the internet.
Be well!
I think its important to have enough of hardware and living space in order to be able to use opportunities of telecommuting work. Ten years ago, in my home city at Russia, when I was a young student, my family wasn't able to afford home computer, so I got a part-time computer work primarily to get an opportunity to get access to computer. Stayed off-hours at office till late, to do my own programming and play games... good memories ;-)
Indeed, looks like average citizen of your country can not afford home computer and even if can, may be dont have enough space at home to work in comfort and quiet environment (its only guess, but I cant figure out any other reasons).
What can be done to solve the problem? OLPC is a very promising opportunity (OneLaptopPerChild project), but they have some difficulties, so providing free laptops scheduled to 2007 not happened, at least not like it was planned. Indeed, charity may be a good way to go. If companies from abroad can buy some hardware, or may be just give away the old hardware which is obsolete because of upgrades, it may help A LOT.
Pls let me know what do you think, because Philippines have most positive background for doing telecommuting work, if peoples from your country will be able to use this opportunity, everyone will be greatly benefited - a lot of good software will be created, new internet services provided, and life of all peoples involved in the process will became better.
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