Manpower lack in Cebu’s BPO sector cited

CEBU CITY – Although Cebu has topped last year’s survey as the world’s top emerging destination for outsourcing and off-shoring, an industry leader here bewails the lack of enough manpower in Cebu’s business process outsourcing (BPO) to meet growing demand in the sector.

“Cebu does not have enough economies of scale to supply BPO firms that continue to expand here. We don’t have to attract more BPO investors but we must in the short term address the problem on human resource,” said Joel Mari Yu, Managing Director of the Cebu Investment and Promotions Center (CIPC), an organization tasked to market Cebu to foreign and local investors.

Citing an industry survey, Yu said BPO companies here could easily hire 5,000 employees each month or 60,000 people annually working as either call center agents or technical support representatives, among others.

However, he said the province can only produce an average of 23,000 graduates a year and only about five percent will immediately qualify to work in BPO firms.

“This means that Cebu can produce only 1,500 students annually to work directly in these outsourcing companies,” Yu said, adding that if he were to include graduates of informal training programs established by private companies and some BPO in-house training facilities, Cebu can only provide 5,000 to 6,000 people that can be absorbed by these BPO firms.

Currently, Cebu employs a total of 60,000 working for the BPO related companies versus 500,000 people working in the industry in Metro Manila.

“The problem is still human resource. We don’t have enough people. One of the requirements in achieving a genuine BPO destination is the availability of manpower,” Yu said.

According to the CIPC Managing Director, if Cebu can produce 100,000 people outright, existing BPO companies here will hire them all. However, because of shortage in manpower, these companies either choose to expand outside of Cebu or hire more employees from such nearby provinces like Bacolod, Tacloban, and Iloilo among others. –MALOU M. MOZO, Manila BUlletin