Many are called but few are chosen. Recruitment specialists report that for every 100 candidates that apply for a BPO job in the Philippines, on average only 3- 4 actually get hired and if the skill sets required are more selective the ratio drops down to 1 in 100. This despite an unprecedented avalanche of demand for people to work for BPO companies.
Universities in the Philippines pump out 350,000 college graduates per annum from various campus across a range of disciplines. Of course, not everyone who graduates from university wants to work in a Contact Centre, but of those that do the hiring rate is very low.
Even though the Philippines is the third largest English speaking country in the world, English is still a second language. People are not native speakers and do not typically speak English at home and it is generally only spoken at work. It is common practice to have strict “English Only” work environments.
Ten years ago the government was warned by the BPO industry that the most important challenge they would face to keep themselves globally relevant was to have a high level of university graduates speaking business and conversational English. It’s no good scrambling to improve the language skills of adults, the process needs to start in primary school.
According to Lesley Rogan, creator and VP of Englishlink, a World leader in online English as a Second Language Training (www.englishlink.com) “The hardest part about working with learners in the Philippines is teaching them to ‘unlearn’ mistakes that have become engrained through years of often inadequate training. Ms.Rogan goes on to say, “The Philippines is a goldmine for keen and culturally-aware BPO workers, on the other hand from my on-the-ground experience, there seems to be a clear drop off in the English language skills of those under 25 years old.” Englishlink was so concerned about this challenge that they are currently allowing Filipinos to access the software for free. Ms Rogan reports that 8,000 people have signed up to take advantage of the offer.
Keshav Murugesh, group CEO of BPO firm WNS told reporters in a recent briefing that the employability rates needs to be improved. ”In our case, we get only one out of 10 applicants,” he said. “However, the challenge is to produce skilled graduates who are employable once they apply for the job. It should be that when there are 10 applicants, all 10 get accepted.”
Over the last few years the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) were given funds to be distributed to BPO firms to conduct training development programs for employees. The quantum of the funds was not really sufficient to really tackle the problem (US$8 million). When the funding was announced everybody naturally wanted to get their share, the reality was that it was insufficient and poorly administered and the fund quickly dried up. It is common knowledge that the requirements to justify the placement of funds were fairly loose. More over it was a Presidential discretionary fund and was not part of an ongoing and sustainable program. Thus it was quickly spent.
