BPO Philippines: Training Filipinos to Serve, Not Lead?
Recently, an executive from an IT outsourcing company in the Philippines published a commentary about the current state of the BPO industry of the country.
According to Kevin Leversee, general manager of an Australian start-up IT company based in Pampanga, Philippines, he has observed a dramatic shift in the focus of inculcating the value of education and profession among the Filipino youth.
He saw that with the growth of the outsourcing industry of the Philippines, the amount of support the government is giving enables the universities to focus on courses that will provide the needed skills to make it in the industry. The universities and the government have been focusing on coming up with a better and bigger workforce that can deliver outsourcing services.
Unknowingly, the Filipinos are actually working for the services needed for foreign people and companies to be innovative. But are the Filipinos changing and innovating as well in the process? According to Leversee, no.
Leversee saw that the government and the big players of the industry are so focused on growing the industry now, yet fail to adapt with the new developments that will be beneficial for the future of BPO in the Philippines.
The education given by the universities is not enough to let the Filipino youth go out off the box and innovate, rather, they are educated to work on the services that conform to the industry.
Leversee compared the Filipinos to the students of California’s Silicon Valley where the IT students are trained to come up with their own ideas, apply it, and make a business out of it. The Filipinos, on the other hand, are trained to support the innovations of the inventors (e.g., Silicon Valley).
He does not hate the industry, but he just wanted to make a point that Filipinos should be trained to do more and not just simply be contented by working in one call center company to another.
For him, the BPO industry would have not grown so immense like it is today if not for the cheap labor it is offering to its foreign clients.
“Why is the Philippines big? Because you’re cheap,” said Leversee. There are many other competitive countries who can do the same work or much more that the Philippines does, but still, the clients go for the latter because of the cheap labor.
On the other hand, the umbrella association of the BPO industry, the Business Processing Association of Philippines (BPAP), said that the country is an IT-BPO hub, growing at a much faster rate than other developing economies.
BPAP president Benedict Hernandez said that the BPO industry accounts for 9 percent of the country’s GDP and 10 percent of the global IT-BPO market share. It is number one in voice-based BPO services and number two in non-voice-based services.
Hernandez still has not given any comment regarding Leversee’s “sensitive” commentary, but assured everyone that the country will not only defend its current status, but will also lead the rest of the world in the IT-BPO industry.
About the Author
Publish on 03/11/2013
is a freelance copywriter, with majority of her work focusing on the outsourcing industry.
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