Thursday, August 27, 2009

RP’s BPO industry creates demand for human resource practitioners

THE Commission on Information and Communication Technology (CICT) is seeing a demand for new service skills in the country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) industry with the onset of the global economic crisis, where more multinational industries are outsourcing functions to cut costs.
CICT Commissioner Mon-chito Ibrahim, in an interview with reporters following the opening ceremonies of the commission’s roadshow last Tuesday, said there is a “sudden” need for human resource practitioners who can handle a company’s back office functions, ranging from salary administration to compensation and benefits.
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At present, he said, there are over 2,000 vacant positions for human resource (HR) practitioners nationwide.
In a separate interview, Dr. Gregg Gabison, who represented the Cebu Education Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedf-it), said that in the province there is also a demand for application developers of systematic and specialized needs of foreign companies.
He said the demand for workers with information technology (IT) skills, on the other hand, can be answered by the 3,000 annual graduates in Cebu, 40 percent of whom get hired as software developers.
However, Ibrahim said BPO companies are experiencing difficulties in filling out vacancies for HR positions since there are only a few HR professionals in the country.
He said there are only six universities in the Philippines that offer human resource as an academic program and most industry practitioners have degrees in psychology.
“With this, our HR practitioners are good in the organizational side but weak in HR work,” he added.
Ibrahim also said that students should start looking at human resource courses since the demand is expected to increase.
Although the biggest sub-sector in the BPO industry remains to be the call center group, Ibrahim said that it is not longer considered the fastest growing.
Aside from back office services—that include HR functions, accounting and financial service—the next top emerging sub-sectors are engineering services and software development.
Ibrahim said that last year the software development sub-sector was able to generate more than $600 million in revenues. The software development group is targeting to raise its revenue contribution to $1 billion in 2010.

Source: The Sunstar Daily Cebu