Call centers' training hub to open additional sites

MANILA, Philippines - A Philippine company running a training facility for call center agents is looking to open sites across the archipelago to keep up with demand. ExcelAsia Training and Development, Inc., a recruitment and training provider for the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, is planning to establish sites in Bacolod, Baguio and other areas in southern Philippines to train at least 1,000 students monthly. Rita Trillo-Ugarte, ExcelAsia president, said this figure is up by half from the current number of near-hires that the company is training each month in its Manila and Cebu facilities. ExcelAsia is a company which helps train “near-hires," or prospective employees who may have met minimum requirements to land a job in a call center. However, since they may still lack a number of basic requirements—such as fluency in the English language—they are required to undergo further training. Since 2006, ExcelAsia has provided training services for 4,000 call center agent-beneficiaries of a government scholarship program for the outsourcing industry. The ExcelAsia training program lasts from one to three weeks, depending on trainees’ skill level and progress. The program consists of two major study areas: English and Communication Skills Training (ECST) and Customer Service Training (CST). After training, these near-hires are employed by the different call centers needing their services. ExcelAsia claims that seven out of ten agents it trains are hired, above the industry standard of at least 40 percent. This year, the government—through the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA)—and industry association Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P) signed another partnership for another scholarship grant worth P350 million to further train some 70,000 near-hires. Ugarte said she expects the hiring rate in the call center industry to increase by as much as 25 percent from the current rate of 5 percent due to this government-industry intervention. “Each call center had its own hiring rate, but most of them were the 3 percent to 5 percent mark. With the TESDA program, however, we were able to help those rates go way up," Ugarte said in an email message. “For some of our clients, the hire rate is up to 50 percent. For others, it’s about 15 to 25 percent. But we’re definitely higher than some call center's own hire rates." Finishing schools are the answer to the dearth of supply in the call center industry which has recently seen a spike in demand here and abroad. The local outsourcing and offshoring industry maintains that it needs the manpower supply to enable global competition. The TESDA-BPA/P program, called the Training for Work Scholarship Program, is part of the government and industry’s efforts to attain a 10 percent share of the global outsourcing market by 2010. - Veronica C. Silva, GMANews.TV