An education system that churns out poor-quality college graduates who can barely speak English is handicapping the Philippines as the former US colony tries to match India and ride a global outsourcing boom to lift millions out of poverty. Despite a huge potential pool for the call center and business process outsourcing industries from a rapidly growing population of 84 million, experts warned there were no quick fixes in the poorly-funded educational system.
Chief executive of C-Cubed Services Jose Xavier Gonzales says the Philippines had an ethnic prescription which should give it an advantage in outsourcing where India is the runaway leader of the field.
"We think American, feel Spanish, and act Asian," said Gonzales, whose business is one of the industry's mid-sized players in the Philippines.
Gonzales was speaking at an outsourcing forum sponsored by the Development Bank of the Philippines and held here last week where business leaders were told that while labour was cheap the quality was poor.
"Our country faces a very dire situation in terms of getting the basic education sector to provide a much more solid foundation of basic education competencies essential for global competitiveness," Education Secretary Florencio Abad told the forum.
National achievement tests given to graduating high school students in the 2004-2005 school year showed that only 6.59 percent could read, speak and comprehend English well enough to enter college.
Some 44.25 percent had no English skills at all.
In a bid to catch-up with international standards, Abad said the government would make pre-school attendance compulsory and ask Congress to lengthen high school education by at least one year.
"As the world shifts deeper and deeper into the information age, education will be essential for a job," said Manila-based business consultant Peter Wallace. "You can put a poorly educated person on a production line, but you can't put them behind a computer."
"The Philippines has few production lines. Agriculture needs only basic education, but leaves people destitute."
Wallace added the Philippines is attracting companies in need of computer literate employees, but the qualified talent pool is already overstretched.
This was highlighted at C-Cubed where Gonzales said 48,000 applications for call service jobs were received last year but only 1,089 people made the grade.
"We have long neglected, under-invested, mismanaged and over-politicised our vast network of public schools and it will take a long time for us to turn this situation around," Abad said.
Gonzales said this year's demand should be around 27,000 call center seats, way above the qualified pool of about 12,000 people from a national total of 380,000 graduates produced annually by the country's tertiary institutions.
Once in the door, outsource workers undergo three months intensive training on culture, geography and "accent neutralisation" to round-off their spoken English and make themselves understood to customers from across the globe.
Call centers, back office services, digitalisation of medical records, animation, and software development now employ 114,000 people in the Philippines, generating annual revenue of 2.022 billion dollars.
Outsourcing for call centers alone produces revenue of one billion dollars a year.
By comparison, the semiconductor and electronics industry generates 27 billion dollars in annual revenue, accounting for around 70 percent of exports and employs around 376,000 people
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