Business process outsourcing (BPO) stakeholders here yesterday called for stronger academe-industry cooperation to address the skills gap that has hampered the growth of their industry.

“There’s a need for a grand-scale academe-industry linkage. The solution should be done at different levels, because some of these problems should have been addressed in kindergarten,” Joel Mari S. Yu, managing director of Cebu Investment Promotions Center, said in an interview at the sidelines of the annual Cebu ICT & BPO Conference held as part of the Cebu Business Month celebration.

Mr. Yu said Cebu City, which has been listed by advisory firm Tholons among the emerged outsourcing destinations in the world, should draw up a program that will ensure availability of qualified workers to meet the needs of outsourcing and other information and communications technology (ICT) companies as they ramp up their operations.

He also recommended that the industry and the government pool their resources to put up a fund that will subsidize universities, on the condition that they raise the standards for BPO-related disciplines.

Commissioner Monchito B. Ibrahim of the Commission of ICT, on the other hand, suggested that the industry start a scholarship program to help those who can’t afford to attend or finish college and, thus, expand the labor pool for the outsourcing industry.

“We need to produce more domain expertise, more masteral and doctorate graduates to transition [sic] Cebu from a call center hub to an innovation hub. If we can help tens of thousands of students through college, we can actually add to the labor pool,” he said.

The need to bridge the industry-academe divide to ensure a steady stream of employable graduates was also recommended by Tholons in the road map that it drew up to guide Cebu City as it moves up to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) from BPO.

The skills gap has compelled some voice-based companies to turn down clients and prevented software development companies from expanding operations.
Butch Sison, site director of Convergys in Cebu, said in a panel discussion at the conference yesterday that the company had to refer some clients back to Metro Manila because it couldn’t find enough qualified people here.

“Availability of talent is a critical issue. A huge chunk of the people we hire here is not even from Cebu, but from Davao, Zamboanga and other areas in the south,” Mr. Sison said.

On the positive side, the Convergys’ experience confirmed Tholons’ observation that Cebu’s strategic location has made it a talent hub for the Visayas and Mindanao, which produce an average of 162,000 college graduates a year.

For companies like Convergys that focus on voice-based services, the major problem lies not so much in proficiency in English, but in the failure of the local graduates to connect with customers.

“A lot of this is cultural. But our people also need to unlearn things to allow their personalities to shine and let them engage in a fluent, casual conversation with the customer. They need to understand that at the end of the line is another human being,” Mr. Sison said.

The academe may have to revolutionize the traditional way of teaching English which is no longer enough, he added.

Convergys currently has nearly 4,000 workers in four sites in Cebu and was hoping to ramp up its work force. “We’re still growing, but it’s a tempered kind of growth because we hire only the best. We don’t hire just to fill in the seats,” Mr. Sison said in an interview.

In the software development sector, Mr. Yu said there are not enough qualified programmers because some universities here have kept their standards low for business reasons.

“The solution would have been simple. Let’s standardize the curriculum, according to UP (University of the Philippines) standards. But some universities here, which depend on tuition for their operations, said they can’t raise their standards because they would lose a lot of students,” he said.

The road map that Tholons had drawn up for Cebu City showed that, based on the skills assessment conducted on 475 graduating students and new hires, there were discrepancies in the verbal abilities of the examinees. Students graduating from BPO-related disciplines had an average score of only 49.4% in verbal ability, while BPO new hires got an average score of 59.2%.

In terms of analytical ability, however, the examinees got scores exceeding the 40% minimum standard in India.
Cebu City’s outsourcing industry currently employs 56,000 people.

Seven out of 10, or 72%, work in BPO.

The KPOs and IT outsourcing sectors employ 13.5% and 14.5% of the work force, respectively. — Marites S. Villamor

Source:http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=Economy&title=BPO-growth-needs-closer-industry-school-ties&id=33872