A proposal has been submitted by a group of information and communications technology (ICT) specialists to Davao City government asking for its help to address the demand for quality workers.
The Business Process Outsourcing Association of Davao, Inc. (BPO-ADI), member of ICT Davao which is composed of information technology-business process management (IT-BPM) companies, believe the current number of BPM workers in the city will not suffice to meet the demand of the industry for the next five years.
“The problem is not finding the right talent but finding the right number of talents,” stressed Eric Manalastas, president of Next BPO Solutions, Inc. and official representative of BPO-ADI.
Belinda C. Torres, president of JoBS eSolutions, Inc. said the proposal, dubbed SWIT (Skills for Work in IT) 2017 was filed earlier this year to the LGU which calls to invest on the training of 700 to 1,000 individuals in the fields of software development, online education, call center, and animation.
According to Torres, SWIT has already kicked off in 2014 with 680 trainees but only 300 completed the training.
“We are looking at about PhP6 million. The reason for this is for software development, it would take them (trainees) about eight months to train,” she said.
For this year, BPO-ADI has proposed to forward the budget to the trainers instead of the trainees to assure that it will be fully-utilized since it is “very expensive to train high-level type of IT competencies”.
She added, the trainers will be coming from the industry and not from TESDA because there are certain level of competencies that cannot be learned from a TESDA school.
“However, the requirement will be based on TESDA requirements,” she said.
Meanwhile Manalastas, said that based on the 2022 roadmap for BPO, the demand for competitive industry service providers will double.
As of 2016, there are 35,000 BPO workers in Davao City.
