Special report: Govt subsidizes call center job training
SPECIAL REPORT - ABS CBN
BY SHERRYL A.G. QUITO
President Arroyo in May announced that she had released half a billion pesos (P500 million) for what she exuberantly dubbed "call-center finishing schools" through a program called "Training for Work Scholarships."
Education and BPO (business-processes outsourcing) experts told The Times the project, which aims to sharpen the English of applicants who "nearly got hired" by call centers were it not for their lack of English proficiency, was "a misallocation of funds."
Pro-globalization officials, economists and businessmen agree that the BPO industry is the key to arresting the unceasing growth of joblessness in the Philippines.
When a BPO company hires a Filipino, it is veritably exporting the Filipino’s service. BPO companies in the Philippines are either foreign-owned or partnerships between foreign and local companies.
Therefore, the BPO universe—of which the call-center industry is a subset—helps the economy in two ways: it reduces unemployment and earns foreign exchange for the country.
The administration identifies call centers as the fastest and most immediate job-generator, an arena in which the Philippines could wrest—from India, Australia and China—global supremacy.
This dream of call-center supremacy is, however, being threatened by the dwindling supply of English-proficient Filipinos.
An educational problem
What we have, then, is an educational problem.
To solve this problem and to attain global Filipino call-center leadership the President and the Technical Education Skills Development Authority (TESDA) have launched the P500-million "Training for Work Scholarships" program.
It is a program that grants scholarships to 100,000 Filipinos who want to work for BPO companies, call centers in particular. It offers full or partial scholarships to Filipinos aged 18 to 55. They should at least be high-school graduates. They can be employed or unemployed, with or without any previous job experience.
Tesda and call-center industry sources reveal that at the very most only 5 out of 100 Filipinos who apply for call-center jobs qualify. The often mentioned hiring rate is even shockingly lower: two percent of all applicants a year.
The program’s objectives
In the President’s "finishing school for call centers" vocationally-oriented lessons will be offered in Tesda-accredited institutions all over Metro Manila.
The program has two objectives: "(1) to provide skills and competencies to job seekers through appropriate training programs that are directly connected to existing jobs for immediate employment; and (2) to empower institutions to offer relevant programs in line with job demands," to quote from a Tesda handout.
In general, the training program aims to facilitate English-proficiency training for "near hires," or those applicants who missed but are near the two-percent hiring rate of the industry. Applicants belonging to the top three percent to 10 percent in terms of ranking are considered by companies "near hires" or "people who almost got hired." In 2006 these more less make up a total of 100,000.
The Philippines’ English-proficiency decline is such a grave problem that it affects not only economic matters like the employability of more Filipinos in call centers and other BPO jobs. The problem influences also the quality of Philippine citizenship, democracy, the judiciary and the criminal justice system, the dignity of Filipinos as members of the increasingly English-speaking human race.
President Arroyo’s Training for Work Scholarships program is obviously not concerned with the larger issue of the decline of English in this country, which until now keeps telling the world that it has an English-speaking population.
Economic-growth driver
But even in solving the problem of winning the battle to become the BPO business champion of the world, will this program work at all?
The Arroyo administration sees the BPO industry as the new "growth driver of the economy," the solution to the problem of massive unemployment. A National Economic and Development Authority report says call centers created 103,000 jobs and earned $3.7 billion for the Philippines in 2005. The country’s economy rarely manages to achieve such figures. It is therefore right that the government exerts efforts to aid the BPO industry.
But is it using the right approach and going in the right direction?
The BPO industry, more than any other in the Philippines, feels the impact of the Filipinos’ general incompetence in English. According to the Commission for Information and Communications Technology (CITC), from 2006 to 2010 the Philippine BPO industry could face a recruitment shortfall of 273,000 English speakers. This could drive alien-owned BPO firms to other countries. The CITC estimates that call centers will account for 55 percent of the skilled labor shortfall. This must be the reason for President Arroyo’s decision to spend half a billion pesos on "finishing schools for call centers."
The John F. Kennedy Center Foundation-Philippines, a company that designs training programs for call centers in the Philippines and seeks to "revolutionize" the Philippine call-center industry, recently released alarming data to the media. Only 11,526 applicants on the average are hired as call-center agents in the country yearly. This is equivalent to only about two percent of all applicants annually. It is a worse figure than the 5 out of 100 earlier mentioned.
Jim Santiago, president and CEO of the John F. Kennedy Center Foundation-Philippines, says, "Most applicants fail because they fail to understand the requirement of global interviews, testing and processing. Secondly, their spoken English becomes a challenge to the examiner, in terms of conversational fluency, tone and accent."
Ed (not his real name), 25, has applied with three call-center companies since September 2005. He invariably got a "Wait for our call" response. But no call ever came. But all three companies, he said, put a premium on English proficiency. Interviews, he added, were conducted entirely in English. Asked how he assesses himself in terms of English-speaking skills, Ed admits that he is not able to sustain a conversation exclusively in English.
100,000 near hires
A former call-center trainer told The Times it merely takes seven minutes for a company to determine whether to accept or reject an applicant. Ed confirms this fact, saying, "There was an instance when I spent more time waiting for the interviewer than the interview itself." One of the call centers Ed applied at required skills not only in English proficiency but also in typing, data encoding and writing a simple composition.
An HR executive in one of the country’s largest call centers reveals that 95 to 98 out of 100 applicants are not hired, because they don’t meet the minimum requirements of fluency in oral and written English. She adds, "For every new hire, we have about five "near hires," or applicants who must undergo extensive training in oral English and keyboarding to meet the minimum job requirements."
These are the approximately 100,000 people who will receive Tesda training under the President’s "finishing school" program.
This does not at all solve the bigger problem of clinching BPO industry supremacy for the Philippines.
Had the President’s planners pondered the issue of "General versus Specific training" they might have arrived at a more correct approach and advanced to the right direction.
Please see:
Pinoys are drilled to master reciting call-center scripts
Better spend P500M on English proficiency for all schoolchildren
Economy hurt by decline in English
Good pay in good night jobs
BY SHERRYL A.G. QUITO
President Arroyo in May announced that she had released half a billion pesos (P500 million) for what she exuberantly dubbed "call-center finishing schools" through a program called "Training for Work Scholarships."
Education and BPO (business-processes outsourcing) experts told The Times the project, which aims to sharpen the English of applicants who "nearly got hired" by call centers were it not for their lack of English proficiency, was "a misallocation of funds."
Pro-globalization officials, economists and businessmen agree that the BPO industry is the key to arresting the unceasing growth of joblessness in the Philippines.
When a BPO company hires a Filipino, it is veritably exporting the Filipino’s service. BPO companies in the Philippines are either foreign-owned or partnerships between foreign and local companies.
Therefore, the BPO universe—of which the call-center industry is a subset—helps the economy in two ways: it reduces unemployment and earns foreign exchange for the country.
The administration identifies call centers as the fastest and most immediate job-generator, an arena in which the Philippines could wrest—from India, Australia and China—global supremacy.
This dream of call-center supremacy is, however, being threatened by the dwindling supply of English-proficient Filipinos.
An educational problem
What we have, then, is an educational problem.
To solve this problem and to attain global Filipino call-center leadership the President and the Technical Education Skills Development Authority (TESDA) have launched the P500-million "Training for Work Scholarships" program.
It is a program that grants scholarships to 100,000 Filipinos who want to work for BPO companies, call centers in particular. It offers full or partial scholarships to Filipinos aged 18 to 55. They should at least be high-school graduates. They can be employed or unemployed, with or without any previous job experience.
Tesda and call-center industry sources reveal that at the very most only 5 out of 100 Filipinos who apply for call-center jobs qualify. The often mentioned hiring rate is even shockingly lower: two percent of all applicants a year.
The program’s objectives
In the President’s "finishing school for call centers" vocationally-oriented lessons will be offered in Tesda-accredited institutions all over Metro Manila.
The program has two objectives: "(1) to provide skills and competencies to job seekers through appropriate training programs that are directly connected to existing jobs for immediate employment; and (2) to empower institutions to offer relevant programs in line with job demands," to quote from a Tesda handout.
In general, the training program aims to facilitate English-proficiency training for "near hires," or those applicants who missed but are near the two-percent hiring rate of the industry. Applicants belonging to the top three percent to 10 percent in terms of ranking are considered by companies "near hires" or "people who almost got hired." In 2006 these more less make up a total of 100,000.
The Philippines’ English-proficiency decline is such a grave problem that it affects not only economic matters like the employability of more Filipinos in call centers and other BPO jobs. The problem influences also the quality of Philippine citizenship, democracy, the judiciary and the criminal justice system, the dignity of Filipinos as members of the increasingly English-speaking human race.
President Arroyo’s Training for Work Scholarships program is obviously not concerned with the larger issue of the decline of English in this country, which until now keeps telling the world that it has an English-speaking population.
Economic-growth driver
But even in solving the problem of winning the battle to become the BPO business champion of the world, will this program work at all?
The Arroyo administration sees the BPO industry as the new "growth driver of the economy," the solution to the problem of massive unemployment. A National Economic and Development Authority report says call centers created 103,000 jobs and earned $3.7 billion for the Philippines in 2005. The country’s economy rarely manages to achieve such figures. It is therefore right that the government exerts efforts to aid the BPO industry.
But is it using the right approach and going in the right direction?
The BPO industry, more than any other in the Philippines, feels the impact of the Filipinos’ general incompetence in English. According to the Commission for Information and Communications Technology (CITC), from 2006 to 2010 the Philippine BPO industry could face a recruitment shortfall of 273,000 English speakers. This could drive alien-owned BPO firms to other countries. The CITC estimates that call centers will account for 55 percent of the skilled labor shortfall. This must be the reason for President Arroyo’s decision to spend half a billion pesos on "finishing schools for call centers."
The John F. Kennedy Center Foundation-Philippines, a company that designs training programs for call centers in the Philippines and seeks to "revolutionize" the Philippine call-center industry, recently released alarming data to the media. Only 11,526 applicants on the average are hired as call-center agents in the country yearly. This is equivalent to only about two percent of all applicants annually. It is a worse figure than the 5 out of 100 earlier mentioned.
Jim Santiago, president and CEO of the John F. Kennedy Center Foundation-Philippines, says, "Most applicants fail because they fail to understand the requirement of global interviews, testing and processing. Secondly, their spoken English becomes a challenge to the examiner, in terms of conversational fluency, tone and accent."
Ed (not his real name), 25, has applied with three call-center companies since September 2005. He invariably got a "Wait for our call" response. But no call ever came. But all three companies, he said, put a premium on English proficiency. Interviews, he added, were conducted entirely in English. Asked how he assesses himself in terms of English-speaking skills, Ed admits that he is not able to sustain a conversation exclusively in English.
100,000 near hires
A former call-center trainer told The Times it merely takes seven minutes for a company to determine whether to accept or reject an applicant. Ed confirms this fact, saying, "There was an instance when I spent more time waiting for the interviewer than the interview itself." One of the call centers Ed applied at required skills not only in English proficiency but also in typing, data encoding and writing a simple composition.
An HR executive in one of the country’s largest call centers reveals that 95 to 98 out of 100 applicants are not hired, because they don’t meet the minimum requirements of fluency in oral and written English. She adds, "For every new hire, we have about five "near hires," or applicants who must undergo extensive training in oral English and keyboarding to meet the minimum job requirements."
These are the approximately 100,000 people who will receive Tesda training under the President’s "finishing school" program.
This does not at all solve the bigger problem of clinching BPO industry supremacy for the Philippines.
Had the President’s planners pondered the issue of "General versus Specific training" they might have arrived at a more correct approach and advanced to the right direction.
Please see:
Pinoys are drilled to master reciting call-center scripts
Better spend P500M on English proficiency for all schoolchildren
Economy hurt by decline in English
Good pay in good night jobs
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