Recruitment consultant says parents need to be convinced that there's career growth prospects for their children at BPO companies.

It's like asking for your girlfriend's hand in marriage--you have to meet her parents, and meet their expectations.

Parents, according to a recruitment consultant, are a key for business process outsourcing (BPO) companies to retaining skilled and talented workers, amid the industry's growing problem with high turnovers.

In a recent forum on talent development and acquisition organized by JobsDB.com in Makati City, Jamea Garcia, executive director for talent development of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), advised BPO companies to give parents a tour of their facilities and acquaint them on the career possibilities that their children have in the industry.

“[Parents] think that work in the industry is simply answering phones and they do not know it involves a variety of work,” Garcia said.

The open house sessions, she said, should be an opportunity to convince parents that “there is a career in the outsourcing and offshoring industry.” 

OTHER CONCERNS

Most workers themselves feel they have no “clear career growth path” in the industry. A survey by BPAP shows that BPO companies has an 18-percent exit rate because of this concern among workers.

BPO companies should address, too, the parents' concerns about the effects of working during ungodly hours. “Most parents don’t want their children to work in call centers because of security and health concerns,” she said. 

There are other reasons, aside from the parents' and the workers' lack of awareness of career potentials, BPO companies are having difficulty in filling up positions and retaining talents: skills mismatch, lack of available talents, and high exit rate.

Call centers are the biggest sector in the Philippine BPO industry. It generates the biggest revenue and employs the most workers. Contact centers accounted for 73 percent of last year’s industry revenue of US$4.8 billion and employ 60 percent of the 300,000 BPO workers in the country. 

RETAINING RP'S POSITION

Other sectors, however, are catching up with the growth of contact centers. Engineering and software sectors registered an 82-percent growth in employment last year.

The Philippines was named last year by the United Kingdom’s National Outsourcing Association as the Outsourcing Destination for 2007.

To retain its position as a top outsourcing destination, the Philippines has to ensure the stead supply of talents.

“The supply of talent will determine the level of growth the industry will experience,” said Garcia.

She said that only few of the 450,000 new graduates a year are qualified to work for the BPO industry because the skills of the new graduates do not meet the requirements of the industry.

“A lot of them are not yet ready to be absorbed by companies,” Garcia said, citing industry statistics showing that only around 6 to 20 percent of applicants are qualified.

RECRUIT IN THE PROVINCES

Last month, experts who attended the 8th Global Sourcing Conference in Manila said that the Philippines should invest in training and education to meet the growing demands of the BPO industry.

The BPAP estimates that the industry will be employing about one million workers by 2010. As of last year, there were 320,000 workers in the industry. Around 600,000 workers will therefore be needed to meet the industry's demand in the next two years.

Companies, she said, must also try to tap into the bigger talent pool in the provinces. Citing statistics from the Commission on Higher Education, Garcia said 42 percent of graduates are in Metro Manila, and they get 82 percent of the jobs in BPO companies. The 58 percent of the graduates, who are in the provinces, get only 6 percent of the BPO jobs. (abs-cbnNews.com/Newsbreak)

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