Vol. XXII, No. 69 [ BusinessWorld Online ]
Thursday, October 30, 2008 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES
INDUSTRY LEADERS remain confident that the Philippines can meet the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector’s labor demands even as firms are looking to expand to offering more sophisticated products like accounting and engineering services.
The country produces enough graduates in the said fields while efforts to strengthen ties between the academe and the industry are under way to improve the laborforce’s quality, the experts said.
"We have more than enough in our work force for specific functions like finance, engineering design, human resource [HR] practitioners and even medical and legal analysts," Business Processing Association Philippines [BPA/P] Chief Executive Officer Oscar R. Sañez said in a telephone interview yesterday.
BPA/P President Danilo Sebastian L. Reyes concurred in a separate phone interview yesterday, saying, "There’s a lot of untapped human resources for these [services]."
College courses for business administration, medicine, and engineering were among the top-enrolled disciplines with 22%, 19% and 13% respective shares of enrollees in school year 2004 to 2005, data from the Commission on Higher Education showed.
This labor supply will be in high demand as "financial institutions, specialized engineering companies and big Fortune 500 firms want to bring their back offices here", Mr. Sañez said.
"A substantial part of the [one million BPO jobs BPA/P expects by 2010] will be coming from these kinds of services," Mr. Reyes said without going into detail.
Cooperation
To ensure that workers’ skills will meet employers’ standards, the public and private sectors have been working together to take an inventory of industry demand and improve training, Presidential Task Force on Education private sector representative Donald G. Dee said.
"We’re increasing coordination between the industry and the academe...to increase hiring rate from a low of two [hired out of] 10 [applicants] to five out of 10," Mr. Dee said in a phone interview yesterday.
Recruitment and training efforts are also being brought outside of Metro Manila to the various regions, Mr. Dee added.
But even more government support, such as increased funding for education and higher pay to ensure the quality of teachers, are needed to ensure a sustainable pool of this skilled work force, Mr. Sañez said. — Jessica Anne D. Hermosa
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