
It was the year 1992 when the first Business Process Outsourcing was first introduced in the Philippines. From then on, a lot of call center companies have grown on major cities in the Philippines. The BPO in Philippines was even named “Sunshine Industry” because of the rampant establishment of BPO firms in this country. And now, the Philippines has overtaken India as the number one BPO service provider in the world.
But as we all know, it is a very competitive world out there, countries around the world are now seeking to challenge the Philippines’ dominance in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, especially in more high-value, non-voice services. Non voice jobs involve table jobs such as transcription, insurance, finance and across industries like airlines and transportation, securities, human resources, litigation and financial services, insurance, data processing, e-publishing and healthcare.
The new challenge is how to develop our own qualified workforce with the specialized skills required by the non-voice sectors such as scalability of entry-level talent; availability of specialized skills; availability and quality of managers; and migration of skilled talent. It is very essential for us to make sure our schools graduate young professionals who can fill in this human resource gap.
Government, industry and institution of higher education are enhancing the regulations in training potential call center and other BPO workers and those engaged in non-voice BPO to make them more competitive and attractive to the industry. TESDA has even ramped up support for training and development of non-voice based skills in the BPO sector particularly in the Visayas to boost the region as a choice destination for investors.
It is very evident that our country is achieving another goal, not just as the number one spot in the outsourcing industry but also as the haven for non-voice Philippine business process outsourcing services.