BPO industry is RP's employment booster

Although economists have different forecasts on the various economies around the world, a majority believed that the business process outsourcing industry will be an employment booster for the Philippines.

TechGrowth Solutions Inc., general manager for business services Paul Winters said that the global recession will reshape the country’s BPO industry into more than just a call center wherein back office solutions and non-voice services will expand.

TechGrowth is a non-voice BPO company operating at the Asiatown IT Park

Winters project that for the short term, there could be belt tightening lay offs that will affect BPO hubs like Cebu as executives from BPO companies are still in a waiting phase while evaluating the impact of the current economic crisis to their businesses.

He said that the restlessness will be felt for a while as companies will be immobilized by the crisis and at this point property managers will likely have trouble filling up office spaces.

However, he said that in the long term, this could be good for Cebu as after about a span of six months, an “outsourcing tidal wave” could occur and this will be concentrated on the influx of more demand on non-voice processes.

Winters explained that outsourcing of knowledge-based positions will be huge as more companies in the West have laid-off their people because they could no longer afford to pay them.

“Companies are hurting as lay-offs in the US also translates to Australia, Europe and other parts of Asia continue but their processes still needs to be done and where better place to do it cheaper and more efficiently than here in Cebu,” said Winters.

He also said that the terrorist incident that recently happened in India will help the Philippines boost its position in the BPO industry as Americans as well as other major investors will be much more comfortable to do their businesses here.

“The shift will be going towards knowledge-based positions; voice will always be there but that wave has already come and it will be time to take it to the next level. Manila is saturated but Cebu has the huge population of educated, young and talented workforce which are very much capable to fit in the positions for back office processes,” he said.

He said that the present administration of US President Barack Hussein Obama will likely review its previous position about outsourcing because it’s “the call of the time.”

“Europe, Australia has not stopped outsourcing their jobs; if the US will stop we will likely lose our competitive advantage,” he said.

Winters stressed that knowledge-based positions will require a whole new set of talents from those required by the contact center industry as these back office jobs will be focused on more specialized fields such as bookkeeping, marketing support, copywriting, animation, web design, and among others.

Meanwhile, in a recent online survey done by the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P) in partnership with Outsource2Philippines (O2P) and managed by a TeamAsia which assessed the status of the Philippine non-voice BPO industry, it showed that among the 190 respondents representing organizations that provide non-voice BPO services, 96 percent characterized 2009 prospects for their organizations as good, excellent, or outstanding.

It also showed that 65 percent expect to expand their workforces from 16 percent to over 200 percent while 98 percent of respondents expect revenues to increase in 2009 and 80 percent of which expect revenues to increase between 11 percent and 50 percent.