BPO - A serious career option

Since its inception in India, the BPO sector has attracted the highest number of Indian youths as its employees. By offering lucrative wages, minimum educational qualification, spoken English being the only important criteria, the Indian youth who were still studying, or were without a degree, for the first time got an opportunity to earn without a degree. This made the Indian youth seek the BPO call center jobs easily when they were short of finances, or when they’d just wanted to earn quickly. Youngsters working made India the IT/BPO hub. However, in the course the way the industry, moreover a job in the BPO industry is perceived as one which is menial, a temporary stop to earn in short time without a degree.

Now, with the growth of the Indian BPO industry, the industry leaders want to change the perception associated with the industry employees. With the further development of the industry, having more to offer than just telephone callers of a call center company, many more Indian youths are aiming to make a serious and long lasting career in Indian BPO industry.  It is with this that many BPO companies in India have come up with various educational programs, seminars, workshops, trainings, to tap the Indian youth for a longer time in the sector. With this, the youth is also seen to get fascinated by the extraordinary monetary rewards, other educational incentives and any such opportunities attached to the industry.

It is as a result of this that the industry is now not just being perceived as what it used to be. Now, there isn’t any more weekend walk-in occurring for BPO jobs in India, which used to happen when the Indian youth had taken the sector lightly. With the growth maturity noticed in all of the BPO companies in India, the process of hiring has changed. Earlier, there were merely Indian call centers and spoken English was the only qualification needed. However, with the maturation happening in the industry, there have been opening up of more operations than just restricted to the call centers and those operations more often include the prospective employees to not only be proficient at their spoken English ability but also be specialized in some field, and should be possessing higher level of analytical ability.

It is because of this that we see, high-end processes being handled by metro cities, since the employee base there is much more talented while delegating the matured and low end processes to the company centers in Tier II and Tier III cities respectively. Moreover, since, the processes are going higher in terms of value, these employees who had once perceived the industry as a place of temporary job to get quick and more money only to further their educational ends or for their experience, are now getting to understand the whole dynamics of the BPO industry and the fact that how much are the functions performed by the industry so vital for ANY business in this day and age.

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A special course for BPO industry contenders

With the current growth that the BPO sector is pushing the Indian economy, has phenomenally marked it a promising industry.  On that, with many more youngsters, are getting graduating in English, and want to be aspirants for BPO, have now the special provision of learning the course before getting to work into it.

Knowing the fact fully, the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) has started a diploma course in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) in partnership with Accenture.  The course has been co-designed by academicians and industry experts, BPO training and e-learning organizations to provide students with a comprehensive learning mode.

One year diploma course will include includes theory as well as practical knowledge about the BPO sector.  The course will cover cross-industry BPO services including finance and accounting, human resources, corporate learning, sourcing and category management, customer contact, order management and technical writing, as well as industry-specific BPO services in insurance, banking, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, engineering, equity research and capital markets.

The course is basically designed to acquaint prospective candidates of BPO industry with the requisite skills needed to be able to work and flourish in the industry.

 The course can be availed by all the aspiring candidates, as well as those who are already a part of BPO sector, from Tier I to Tier III cities of India. Basic requirement for the candidate in terms of qualification should be -   CBSE 10+2 or equivalent.  The other basic requirement/eligibility criteria needed to apply for the course is to have a passed the IGNOU certificate course in Communications skills or an equivalent program as deemed by IGNOU. However, if the aspiring candidate doesn't have one then they will have to be screened through a communication evaluation test, making them eligible to enroll for the programme.

The course will be taught through various/mixed channels such as CD, Web-based materials, lab-based contact sessions and simulated exercises.

All in all everyone, who has a thrust to be a part and excel the in the BPO industry, can avail to this course.

Therefore, the course can be studied by undergraduates, post graduates and even by working professionals.  The last date for submission of applications to the course is due 30th July.

Therefore, this jointly developed course is certainly a great endeavor on part of the company and the University to have started this course. The course designed to provide such complete training and career opportunities is surely going to help balloon the growth of Indian outsourcing industry.

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Tier II and Tier III cities – next best BPO hubs in India

growth of the services has only been limited among the megalopolises of India.  Keeping in mind the phenomenal capacity this sector has to benefit the Indian economy, the debate of BPO companies establishing their company branches /campuses in smaller cities of India, has now ushered to make us understand many factors leading to the debate, the opportunities and pitfalls for the same.

Reasons for setting BPO business base in Tier II and Tier III cities:

According to KPMG's report "a number of information technology and BPO companies are opening centers in these places to reduce operational expenditures. These smaller cities offer advantages such as availability of talent at a lower cost, low attrition rate, affordable real estate, local government support, and a better quality of life. Analysts agree that by taking operations to a tier-III city, a company can save up to 30 per cent cost. A growing domestic market is also driving companies to open centers in tier-III cities, said Sangeeta Gupta, vice-president (VP), Nasscom.

The biggest advantage of setting up centers in the smaller cities is that there is a lower rate of attrition among the people of such cities, which saves on the training and retention cost.  The other added incentive is that these cities are small and hence managing them is much easier. This doesn't set a tough managerial challenge. Moreover, now there have sprung excellent colleges in these cities and students who are graduating from there colleges are extraordinary talented and some of those students are seriously considering to work in the BPO sector. Therefore, it becomes vitally important for BPO companies to set up their centers in smaller cities.

Advantages of setting BPO centers in Tier II and Tier III cities:

Getting operationalized in smaller cities saves the company with higher set-up costs. Since, the set-up costs are already getting costlier in Tier I cities, setting up of centers in smaller cities is economically advantageous to these BPO companies. More so, the talent in these countries can be tapped for making services available in vernacular languages. This helps in bringing up the employment level of smaller cities and moreover it leads to the balanced development of all the regions of the country, there by only leading to regional development and thus regional growth and that affecting and boosting the overall economic growth and development of the country.

Disadvantages of setting BPO centers in smaller cities:

Now, you always need talented managerial executives to work to look over the operations of these centers. However, this might be difficult as there might be reluctance on their behalf to move in to smaller cities. Also, you might not always get highly talented workforce as compared to Tier I cities workforce. There might also be problem with regards to the network connectivity and the right and needed infrastructure needed for setting up of BPO centers in smaller towns. 

All in all, the idea of setting up of Indian IT-BPO companies in smaller cities is indeed of boundless importance for all the stakeholders of the economy. However, as far as the problems regarding its initialization are concerned, there only needs to be done a setup of structured and scientifically designed process.

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