DoST to launch free training modules for BPO industry

The Department of Science and Technology (DoST), through the Information and Communications Technology Office, will be launching free training modules that will assess and beef up the skills of would-be business process outsourcing practitioners.

During his keynote at the International Outsourcing Summit on Thursday, Trade Secretary Gregory Domingo said education and capacity building were on top of the DoST’s agenda for the BPO industry.

One of the programs that the DoST was working on, he said, was an online or CD-based training tool designed to help potential BPO employees prepare themselves to be part of the BPO workforce.

Domingo said this could be one of the ways to bridge the supply-demand gap in the BPO talent pool.

Based on industry estimates, he said the BPO sector needed between 80,000 and 100,000 qualified personnel every year. The country produced around 400,000 college graduates each year.

“Because of the size of the requirement that we have to fill every year for the foreseeable future, I really felt that doing it the classroom way may not be sufficient. Therefore, we will have to address this problem in a bigger way by offering free courses, either online or through free CDs,” Domingo said.

He said that, as a suggestion to Science and Technology Secretary Mario Montejo, the training modules should have two components: an assessment tool that would allow users to determine which areas needed improvement and the actual training modules.

According to Business Processing Association of the Philippines senior executive director Gillian Joyce Virata, the current average hiring rate in the industry was just 5 percent.

BPAP chairman Alfredo Ayala said the organization wanted to not only improve the hiring rate, but also to improve the quality of the country’s BPO workers.

To do this, he related that BPAP was focusing on five key initiatives: training near hires, training the trainors, laying down standards for BPO competencies, rolling out a service management degree in colleges and universities, and implementing a career marketing campaign.

In an earlier interview, Virata said BPAP was working with the Commission on Higher Education to embed industry-relevant content in the current curriculum.

“Initially, around 21 units (or seven subjects) have been prepared, including BPO fundamentals, quality assurance, business process management, and project management,” she said. “We can offer this as a service management course that can be taken with whatever degree a student is getting. That’s for the undergrad. For post-graduate studies, it can be a certificate course in service technology management.”

Virata said BPAP would also be using the P500-million funding that the Department of Budget and Management had committed to implement more “train the trainor” and faculty development programs.

According to BPAP’s Roap Map 2011-2016, the BPO sector had the potential to post at least $20 billion in revenues by 2016 and even as high as $25 billion with stronger public-private partnership.

A $20-billion industry could provide employment to as many as 900,000 individuals. A $25-billion industry, on the other hand, could give jobs to as many as 1.3 million people.—Abigail L. Ho