Academe invests on BPO mini-labs to train students

To address the manpower problem hounding the call center industry, the academe has started to invest on a mini-laboratory facility designed to train students on call center operations.

Commission on Higher Education (CHED-7) regional director Enrique P. Grecia said this is the pro-active gesture from the academe to address the difficulties of call center companies to hire good and qualified call center agents in Cebu.

"The academe is trying to address the call center manpower shortage, by buying needed hardware for call center operations, for the hands-on training of the students," Grecia said.

University of Cebu (UC), University of San Carlos (USC), and University of San Jose-Recoletos (USJR), among others already have mini-call center training facilities in their school.

Aside from investing into this kind of facility, Grecia said these universities and colleges have also modified their language (training) curriculum, incorporating the culture, and "twang" of the west.

Grecia believes that English proficiency of Filipinos is still better than that of other countries like India.

"Our English proficiency is still good, compared with other countries. We are still better English speakers," he said.

In time, he added that the Philippines will overtake India, as the number one preferred site for call center investors in the world.

"There will come a time that we overtake India," he said.

Also, he said that the call center operators' initiative to partner with the academe is a good development in order to sustain the growing demand for call center agents.

In a separate earlier interview with Bong Borja, president of PeopleSupport Philippines Inc., he said that instead of blaming the government, and the academe sector, call center firms are called to work harder, and be proactive in solving the country's long standing problem on shortage of human resource in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry.

Borja said through a pro-active and more innovative way of recruiting the right people to fill the dire need of call center agents, call center companies will be able to resolve the problem on their own.

"Call center firms need only to be creative and proactive in recruitment so they could get more manpower," Borja said.

He said the BPO industry is not just the responsibility of the government, and that supplying the needed skilled and qualified manpower for the BPO sector is also a problem for the players themselves.

Out of the total 66,950 new workers needed by the call center industry in 2006, only 44,000 seats will be filled by new graduates this year.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in her recent pronouncement, she said that by the end of the decade, the call center sector alone is expected to generate about 1 million jobs for the Philippines.

In the last five years, the call center industry had generated over 200,000 jobs to Filipinos.