GMA wants scholarship program for call center workers

President Arroyo directed the Technical Education Skills Development Authority (TESDA) yesterday to establish a scholarship program for 100,000 young Filipinos seeking employment in business process outsourcing (BPO) firms and call centers.

As this developed, Malacañang urged the country’s close to 400,000 new graduates to consider putting up their own businesses instead of adding to the million others seeking regular employment.

Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye said new graduates should seriously "explore not just regular employment but also entrepreneurship."

Bunye assured the graduates the government has an active machinery in place to facilitate the meeting of employers and prospective employees, alongside programs to boost micro, small and medium enterprises.

"Jobs are the cornerstone of our economic plan and this is highlighted every year at this time as our new graduates enter the mainstream of the labor force," Bunye said.

"As the economy grows on a foundation of political stability, so will the opportunities for work, domestically and globally," he added.

The total of unemployed persons in the country numbered 2.8 million in January 2006, which translates to an unemployment rate of 8.1 percent.

The incidence of underemployment, on the other hand, went up to 21.3 percent in January 2006 from 16.1 percent a year ago.

The President made the directive to create a scholarship program for the BPO and call center industries as she attended the inauguration of the American company Sutherland Global Services and thanked its officials for their plans to expand operations of its BPO facility in Makati City.

Relatedly, TESDA Director General Augusto Syjuco Jr. said the President increased his agency’s budget from P50 million to P500 million to be able to provide more scholarships for graduates and meet the growing demand for employees in BPO and call centers in the Philippines.

There have been reports that Filipino applicants could not fill the thousands of vacancies in the various BPO and call centers in the country because many had failed the qualifying examination and other requirements.

During a televised roundtable discussion, the President said it would be better to provide scholarships rather than build schools since the infrastructure would cost the government a lot.

The President said the scholars could choose the schools they would want to enter as the government allotted P1.1 billion for college and technical students.

Sutherland is the largest independent BPO company with 12,000 professionals worldwide. The company’s operations in the Philippines started in June 2005 and its headquarters are based in New York.

It plans to double the number of Filipino employees hired to 1,500 over the next six months from the current 750.

Dilip Vellodi, Sutherland chairman and chief executive officer, assured that "strategically, the Philippines is going to be a key geography as we continue to expand our footprints in Asia.

"The Philippines continues to show great promise as a delivery location, offering advantages of high value at a competitive cost, along with a robust talent pool that will allow us to consistently meet the needs of our global clients," Vellodi added.

The President expressed her gratitude to Sutherland and said from less than 2,000 workers in 2001, the figures ballooned to 125,000 in just a few years. One hundred thousand more are expected to be employed this year.