WILLIAMS: Sky is limit for BPO industry
ROGER WILLIAMS is the national outsourcing coordinator, with a mandate from the Government to create an environment to boost local and foreign investments in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. BPO Jamaica spoke recently to Roger about his role.
BPO Jamaica: What are your responsibilities as the national outsourcing coordinator?
RW: As the title suggests, it is primarily about coordinating all the key initiatives and tasks that we agreed on from our national strategic plan to grow our BPO sector to ensure that we are executing as planned and that everyone involved in this effort is playing their role in this growth initiative.
No matter how sound your plan might be, you will be faced with difficulties occasionally, and a part of my role is to find appropriate responses, including getting the decision makers to agree on the best course of action in such situations.
BPO Jamaica: What have your priority areas been since you were appointed?
RW: Most of the time spent in this role so far is in the talent-development phase.
Over the next nine to 12 months, a lot of the focus is on HEART Trust/NTA, and its efforts through partnerships with other institutions, to close relatively small skills gaps, to help persons who are offering themselves to the industry to become employable. These may include communication challenges or specific skills such as multitasking while using operating systems. These are some of the things the industry needs.
HEART has driven development of a few programmes that are geared towards the customer-engagement segment of the industry, and that development came with heavy input from the business process outsourcing sector. So HEART is really trying to drive the need as the sector communicates them to it and the training fraternity.
In the medium to longer term, especially as we try to move up the value chain of more complex process outsourcing or knowledge process outsourcing, some of the fundamentals in our formal education system have to be addressed. This includes the
introduction into our secondary schools of some of the areas HEART now focuses on.
BPO Jamaica: Will we ever be able to satisfactorily respond to the demand for bilingual workers?
RW: That is not a focus of ours in the near term. We have decided to take advantage of our strength as the third-largest English-speaking country in this hemisphere, and many organisations still have English as a primary business language. In Latin America and the United States, the growth of the Hispanic population is helping to drive the demand for Spanish-speaking customer service, but we have no immediate plans to tap into that at this time.
BPO Jamaica: Tell us about your educational background and professional life.
RW: I attended Calabar High School and then went on to the University of the West Indies, where I did mechanical engineering. I worked for several years in the manufacturing industry with Red Stripe then in the services industry, where I managed Grace Kennedy Money Services for several years; did a stint with a lottery company, then I ended up in the BPO space with Vista Print. This was very new to me and very challenging, but luckily, I was working with people that helped me. I got a lot of help from the agents, the very people who left secondary or tertiary school into their first job. They helped me to understand customer service and the nuances of how an effective BPO company works. I will always be grateful to them.
BPO Jamaica: Finally, where do you see the local outsourcing sector in the next 10 years?
R W : It is basically an export services business, and Jamaica has the whole world at its feet in terms of potential customers in outsourcing. We want to continue the development of our talent to take advantage of the jobs that are going to be created in terms of the different types of skills that are being demanded. We are on course to generate 11,000 more jobs for this fiscal year, which is a 50 per cent increase over last year. So if we just use that as one data point and extrapolate from that, the sky is the limit in 10 years.
We are on course to generate 11,000 more jobs for this fiscal year ... . So if we just use that as one data point and extrapolate from that, the sky is the limit in 10 years.