Reporter

FILIPINO workers who are usually displaced by companies opting to outsource their services can now find jobs in the booming business process outsourcing (BPOs) as a labor group started skills training for workers on industrial tasks.

The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), a group of 27 labor federations nationwide, has trained more than a thousand jobseekers since October 2006.

The TUCP Workers College conducted several training for workers to prepare them to meet the tighter regulations for jobs in call-center companies and home-services workers (HSWs) abroad.

“The employment rate for our graduates is 70 percent and that excludes those who get hired for overseas jobs,” said TUCP spokesman Alex Aguilar. “We partner with different call-centers like NCO, Allorica and Intellicare that conduct job fairs at TUCP regional offices.”

The TUCP noted that most of the applicants who qualified for jobs abroad as home-service workers and BPOs are college graduates and have a good command of the English language. But most of the workers who have been displaced from various industries do not fit to these requirements.

The TUCP program is a 100-hour training open to everyone 18 to 55 years old who hurdle a screening test conducted by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (Tesda).

So far, the TUCP has finished the training for more than 1,000 workers. These include former overseas workers, market vendors, tricycle drivers, retrenched factory workers and students.

The TUCP Workers College is tied up with Tesda with speech training on conversational English, American geography and basic computer literacy.

Aguilar said the TUCP program is based on the recent industry outlook citing that the call-center industry has the highest labor absorption capacity.

Statistics from the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) showed that business process outsourcing (BPO) operations such as call centers have generated as much as $3.36 billion in 2006.

Aguilar said after the workers have finished the training, the TUCP would also coordinate with other BPO companies to find jobs for their graduates.

He said Filipino workers should take advantage of the skills training to fit for jobs in the BPO industries because the salaries are far higher than those in factories and industrial sites.

Aguilar said if the worker gets a job in a call center, he would earn an average of P15,000 to P20,000 instead of the lower rate of $200 that he would earn as a home-service worker abroad.

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