MANILA, Philippines—While the Philippines’ deep bench of English speakers makes the country top of mind for most companies off-shoring some of their functions, workers of the local business process outsourcing sector need to go beyond just English proficiency to advance in the field.
“What we need is strong material for leadership—someone with critical thinking. We don’t want to hire a ‘potential.’ We want to hire people who can immediately play the role of manager because the pressures in the industry are enormous,” Sitel Philippines Corp.’s Noel Duldulao said in a forum.
Duldulao said there was still a dearth of BPO managers and executives, despite there being around 400,000 workers in the BPO sector.
Accenture Philippine recruitment head Rina Clamor agreed, saying most of the company’s high-value, healthcare-related services were still headed by expatriates.
This made leadership positions in the BPO sector very high-priced, she said.
She said the yield rate in the BPO industry was “very poor” at around 5 percent--or five hires from a sea of 100 applicants.
JP Morgan country operations manager Barry Marshall, for his part, said BPO workers who could offer more than good English would make the industry more sustainable.
“Because of the economic crisis, cost efficiency has become a critical factor. To be a globally integrated enterprise, one has to think more about the long-term play and not just short-term labor arbitrage,” he said.
“Labor arbitrage erodes over time. What we need are people who can contribute to the bottom line. Success comes from a combination of labor arbitrage and cost efficiency. These would make for a successful long-term play,” he added.
He said critical thinking was an important trait for BPO workers to imbibe, as this provided added value to what they could do. Beyond answering calls and doing basic voice functions, critical thinking could be applied to other aspects of the BPO chain.
“Just having English proficiency doesn’t give us sustainability. That’s good for immediate hiring. But for long-term sustainable value, we need soft skills and critical thinking,” he said.
