BPO biggies plan training schools

Bangalore: The acute skill mismatch in the labour-intensive BPO industry is spawning a whole new breed of BPO schools in the country.
   NIIT in association with Genpact, the country’s largest BPO outfit, has set up a joint venture, NIIT Institute of Process Excellence (NIPE) which has a mandate to train over 100,000 people in the next two years. All of the top 15 Indian BPO firms are likely to join the initiative.
   Lathika Pai, cofounder of BPO firm B2K, has just set up a BPO training outfit called Fides Global Consultants. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has said it will soon start offering, in alliance with Accenture, a diploma course to train students for jobs in the BPO industry.
   Som Mittal, president of Nasscom, says the BPO industry has migrated from vanilla tech support services to supply chain and high-end analytics; so the industry today needs people with vertical knowledge in insurance, supply chain and retail.
   “The world over, even undergrad level people are trained for vocation. In India, on the contrary, even graduates are confused about what career to take up. People are increasingly realising that BPO is a serious career and offers limitless growth opportunity. It’s high time our academia revised the curricula and syllabi to include BPO courses,’’ said Mittal.
   Ashish Basu, president of new business incubation at NIIT, said NIPE will open 200 BPO training centres across the country in three years. Each of these centres will have 10 to 12 faculty members. The centres will offer a two-month training and a one-month internship course. It will have modules like basic English, basic BPO knowledge (customer service, understanding of multi culture) basic key board skills, IT skills, and an elective (either advanced English or finance and accounting). Later on, more vertical-based electives like banking, supply chain and insurance are expected to be added.
   “Genpact and other BPOs are expected to be part of the initiative and will give provisional job offers to all trainees, and on their successful completion they would have a job on their hand,’’ said Basu.
   IGNOU will offer BPO courses to support practices in finance and accounting, insurance, banking, human resources, sourcing and category management, customer contact services, healthcare, pharma, engineering services and equity research.
   “The BPO industry today needs experts in areas like finance and legal matters. We are today forced sometimes to depend on college dropouts or 10th/12th pass people,” says Rincy Roosevelt of Ahmedabad-based knowledge process outsourcing firm Sunbelt Business Solution.
   Currently, BPO firms spend huge amounts of time, money and energy in turning new recruits billable. Each recruitment typically costs around $500, another $1,000 is spent towards initial training while process training costs an additional $500. That means, in the first few months of joining, each BPO employee costs an employer $2,000. So industry pays a whopping $100 million to hire 50,000 people. Training is heavily eating into the profits of BPO firms. BPO education through third parties will help companies save upto 70% of the cost. The rest goes into training in domain and customer specific processes that cannot be outsourced to third parties on account of data privacy issues.
   Lathika Pai says the tragedy is 50% of the BPO joinees leave the company before they complete their first year, making the actual cost even higher.
   Fides is talking to VCs and principals of colleges and universities to create awareness about the BPO industry. They are also meeting parents and potential candidates to dispel what they see as myths and misconceptions about the industry.
   Nasscom is trying to create a new layer in the educational sector to help BPOs. Mittal suggests that since colleges don’t typically work after 4pm, these facilities can be used in the evening for BPO training. “The same faculty could teach, but today there are restrictions such as paying extra to the faculty,” he says.
   mini.joseph@timesgroup.com
   john.sujit@timesgroup.com