SSON: Oscar, what is the purpose of BPA/P, and how does the Association operate to achieve that purpose?
Oscar Sa?ez: The Business Processing Association of the Philippines was created in 2004 by members of the BPO industry, in order to present a single face of the industry to the world. Prior to this, there were several organisations that had been representing various sectors in offshoring and outsourcing in the country. It was apparent that there was a strong need to have a single industry body representing all the interests of these organisations in terms both of marketing the industry externally, and internally to be able to address many of the common challenges and opportunities that the industry was facing at that time. So there was an effort to consolidate several of these small organisations, and a single umbrella organisation ? BPA/P ? was formed.
Quickly after that the BPA/P board elected to create a full-time management team to do a couple of things: one, to develop and own a strategic plan to guide the growth of the industry short- and long-term; and the second was to have a fully dedicated team to be the leaders responsible for getting all the stakeholders committed to executing the strategic plan as it was developed. This is now called the "roadmap" for the industry which BPA/P is leading and working on with all the stakeholders.
SSON: BPA/P is running a successful scholarship program for advanced post-graduate training. Can you tell us a little about this and why it will benefit foreign companies looking to source to the country?
OS: Basically the BPA/P roadmap covers three major subjects, of which talent development is one. The scholarship programme falls under the initiative of ensuring talent development sustainability over the next several years, and is a programme that we have created in partnership with the government. We found there was a significant segment of the graduate pool that needed some kind of a completion course or supplementary training programme to ensure that
The industry tested a training programme a year ago to supplement the recruitment programme that was already in place. We had a very good experience with supplementary programmes that were being run in vocational schools as well as in independent training companies that were members of BPA/P. We approached the government and asked for support so we could train a lot more young people into the programme and convert them into full-time hires. The government responded positively by providing a budget of close to $10million this year, to be able to train about 50,000 young people into the programme: of course we don't foresee all of them passing the completion course but at least 40,000 should pass and therefore get recruited into our pool this year, so if we're able to convert them into full-time employment that is at least 40,000 additional available to us.
SSON: You've mentioned a degree of official support there: how closely does BPA/P work with the Filipino government?
OS: We work very closely and very collaboratively with the government, particularly on three levels. One is with the educational agencies of government, and the scholarship programme is a good example of how we have collaborated with TESDA [Technical Education & Skills Development Authority] which is the vocational institute government body coordinating group which works with us in providing supplementary training for young people here.
Another agency that we work with is the Board of Investments, which is the government's investment-promotion group, as well as the attached agency to that which is the Philippine Economic Zone Authority: the body which supervises the IT parks for setting up BPO sites in the country. What we have done with them is work together on streamlining our investment promotion processes, including trade missions abroad as well as with investors who come to the Philippines, so we have a simplified communication process ? a one-stop-shop mechanism if you will ? so that when investors come in we have the private sector (which is BPA/P) working closely with key representatives of the board of investors on our overall presentation of industry opportunities. This is done very well; we have received a lot of positive responses.
Then lastly we work with the Office of the President through the Commission of ICT. This is the government body that coordinates with various telecommunications and software companies to support the overall regional development of what the government calls the Cyber Corridor: the ICT infrastructure which links Manila with the rest of the key cities in the country. Part of what we have in the roadmap is a way in which we can accelerate the development of new sites for expansion of BPO companies outside Manila, and we're able to work with various ICT bodies within local government councils outside Manila to prepare them for investment. These ICT councils have simplified for us the work in getting all the key stakeholders in one place; property developers, the telco companies in each region, local government units and academia are able to work together to create new sites for expansion - and get investors to consider these places as potential new sites. So we have worked very closely with government on this effort and it's given us a lot of positive gains for investment promotion.
SSON: So significant collaboration with government ? but BPA/P is a purely private-sector organisation?
OS: We are purely a private sector group consisting of BPO players themselves as well as key vendors in the industry. The support we're getting from government is more for collaboration and coordination, as well as the scholarship support - which is not only financial support, but also the way by which we are able to distribute scholarship vouchers to young people: the government then reimburses them directly on those expenses.
SSON: Moving on: the BPO sector in the Philippines is a great success story - but it's not all plain sailing. What do you see as being the biggest challenges to the sector and how do BPA/P and tienda de camisetas de futbol en madrid big industry players intend to overcome or avoid those challenges?
OS: OK. There are a couple of big ones as far as we're concerned. Firstly, though we have been able to successfully promote the Filipino BPO industry because of our available talent and the quality tienda de camisetas de futbol en madrid of our talent, we'd like to be able to accelerate our growth and the big challenge for us is how fast we can make our talent available in front of us because of the remarkable growth-rates that we have seen and will continue to see over the next few years. There is a big, straining demand for talent and we would like to make sure that we're able to sustain that talent both in terms of quantity and quality - and not only in Manila but outside as well. And the challenge lies in making sure the system is responsive enough to the demand.
Right now we do face competition from the growth of other sectors - for example tourism and medical services ? and the demand from outside the Philippines for OFWs [overseas Filipino workers] is also increasing. So we're competing in the universities for talent that is required by other countries poaching talent from the Philippines, and by other fast-growing sectors. So a challenge for us is ensuring that we're able to promote career prospects for the industry in many of these universities.
The challenge also lies in increasing access to more universities beyond the traditional sources that we recruit from, as well as being able to tune the curriculum programmes of many of the universities to be more in line with the requirements of our industry; for example, ensuring that we do have high-quality English-language and IT proficiency programmes made available early on in the university years. This is why in BPA/P we do have a director who is devoted to talent development challenges; she leads university partnerships to ensure that we're able to get universities to respond more closely to industry requirements, as well as developing new training standards and skills-assessment methodologies that we'd like to implement at university level, so that we are able to sharpen our recruitment much more. That is our biggest challenge.
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