Hope for the Future

These days, it's very rare for a person to walk into a room and not meet someone who has worked, is working, or is planning on working at a call center. For a lot of Philippine graduates, the call center has become THE place of employment. With starting pay that is much, much higher than minimum wage, it's no wonder fresh graduates (even not-so-fresh graduates) are lining up to join call center companies.

Call centers began to thrive in the Philippines because of the phenomenon of the outsourcing boom. What exactly does outsourcing mean? Answers.com states that it is contracting with organizations outside your country for work that could otherwise be done by employees within your company. More and more companies from developed countries are hiring people in poorer Asian and European countries to do all sorts of work: from making 3-d models to answering customer queries to transcribing medical information. All this is happening for the simple reason that it's much cheaper to outsource rather than to hire their own countrymen. Employers consider this cheap but quality labor. For the laborers, though, it’s not really cheap. Consider where these laborers live… $10 a day is not much to a multinational company, but it’s more than minimum wage to a Filipino.

Call center services are just one of the outsourcing sectors being promoted by the Philippine government. The others are: animation, software development, medical transcription, and business process outsourcing*. The amazing thing is that there are not enough people to fill the jobs being offered. Things have certainly changed. When our age group was in grade school, our Social Studies teachers used to tell us that there aren't enough jobs for Filipinos, and that's the reason why there are so many OFWs out there. Who would have thought that there would actually come a time where there are too many jobs instead of too many people?

The sad problem is that a lot of Filipinos are not qualified for these jobs. Thankfully, this problem is now being addressed. Some companies serve as training centers for would-be-call center employees, and even offer English proficiency modules online. Other companies in animation are willing to train people for free, provided they work for the company.

But of course, not everything is happy and perfect in the world. There’s bound to be a sourpuss (or several) out there. For example, citizens of developed countries are afraid that outsourcing will rob them of their jobs. Is this a valid fear? Maybe, maybe not. But there are people out there who believe that with the savings and income made from outsourcing, companies are now getting the means to develop programs that have need for their countrymen’s expertise, thus disproving the theory that outsourcing takes away jobs**.

Overall, outsourcing is definitely a gift. And for a third world country like the Philippines, it just might be our hope for the future.

*http://news.inq7.net/breaking/index.php?index=1&story_id=52593; visited August 14, 2006
** http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2006/08/us_tech_workers.html; visited August 14, 2006


Links:
ml;jsessionid=KEF1MUMEYYROUQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN
http://www.cio.com/archive/071506/global_outsourcing.html
http://www2.cio.com/research/surveyreport.cfm?ID=10
http://www.blogsource.org/2005/10/japanese_animat.html
http://www.i-telco.com/call-center-outsourcing-services-in-philippines.html

Some Companies that Practice Outsourcing:
http://www.ajketcher.com/
http://www.3dstormstudio.com/
http://www.accenture.com/