Execs: More collaboration with BPO firms, academe

Outsourcing companies should collaborate more with the academe to produce more specialized talents and fuel more growth to the KPO or Knowledge Process

Outsourcing sector.

Stakeholders in the information communication technology/business process outsourcing sector, who attended yesterday’s 2012 ICT/BPO Conference at the Radisson Blu Hotel, recommended this action as they emphasized the need for talents both in quantity and quality to sustain the industry’s growth.

The academe would be ready and open to engage in more specialized trainings for their students, said Greg Victor Gabison, Cebu Education Development Foundation for Information Technology (CEDF-IT) president and dean of the College of Information, Computer and Communications Technology of the University of San Jose-Recoletos

“We from the academe are also concerned with the quality of our graduates. We are always willing to work with them especially now that one of the strategies is to move up to higher level outsourcing or the KPO which involves more specialization,” said

Gabison.

Aspire People Solutions (Aegis People Support recruitment arm) is bracing for the effect of the K+12 program three years from now.

“Three years from now, there will be no college graduates. We are already looking as far as that and preparing ourselves. We have already partnered with universities in Cebu training their teachers and empowering them to train their students like how we do it especially in soft skills,” said Dennis Tagamolila, Aspire People Solutions senior

manager.

Aside from this, Gabison said the academe would want more partnerships for highly technical and specialized skills training like cloud computing and other latest technologies now available.

Gabison also asked the government to streamline the collaboration process among the stakeholders in the industry to make sure that the best practices would be learned and implemented to ensure continued growth.

For his part, Luis Casambre, ICT Office executive director, said that the industry’s was aiming to earn $50 billion by 2016, which would be achievable considering the the rate that the industry had grown over the past decade.

Five years from now, the outsourcing industry’s size would be expected to double, said Jojo Uligan, Call Center Association of the Philippines executive director.

He said that this could be achieved with a project growth rate of 15 percent every year.

“Of the 416,000 jobs in the outsourcing industry today, Cebu has about 75,000 (of that number),” said Uligan.

“We project the industry to double its size by 2017 at an average growth rate of 15 percent year-on-year. That is however very conservative because the industry growth goes beyond 15 percent over the last decade.”

Granting that we would grow by 20 percent every year, the country would be looking at about 1.1 million jobs by 2017, said Uligan.

He also suggested that outsourcing companies should start looking at other markets like Australia, Europe and New Zealand aside from the US, which is the current market of the industry.

“I’m not however worried about the demand, it’s the supply that we are worried about. It’s time that we put our acts together and come up with a good resolution to this. There’s a lot of opportunities for us here and we need to double time,” said Uligan.

Cebu Investments and Promotions Center managing director Joel Mari Yu presented his idea of a unified recruitment initiative to be done in major cities and provinces in Visayas and Mindanao to get more talent supply to fuel the ever increasing requirement

in Cebu.

Tagamolila said his firm would support the initiative and would join CIPC in this endeavour.

“I’m sure others (outsourcing companies) will also join,” said

Tagamolila.