BPO industry calls for worker skills upgrade

THE Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) has renewed calls to re-skill employees to avert employment losses to new technologies that can replace humans in lowend jobs.

“To be able to keep jobs, to maintain growth levels of the industry, and to further build more jobs, we need to re-skill people,” Infosys BPO Philippines Country Head Ma. Rhodora Campos was quoted as saying in a statement over the weekend.

CCAP, an umbrella organization of contact center firms, has expressed concerns over threats that artificial intelligence, automation, and other technologies, can replace workers in the call center industry.

The group has pressed members to develop skills beyond the Philippine advantage in English fluency.

The BPO sector employs about 1.15 million people and is projected to generate close to $40 billion in revenue by 2022.

“We need to continue the education, the partnership, the collaboration so everybody will understand exactly what we need to do as an industry, as a country to be able to capture the growth and to be able to capture new potential business opportunities,” CCAP President Jojo Uligan said in the statement.

“For us to be able to create more jobs for more Filipinos, we need to understand that. We need to work together. There are lot more things to do,” he added. —