TAGBILARAN CITY, Bohol (PIA) – In the next five months, the country’s information, communication technology (ICT) industry would be putting up an additional one million jobs, to support its business process management (BPM) sector.
No less that the Department of Information Communications and Technology (DICT) Undersecretary Jocelle Batapa-Sigue, who shared this ambitious goal the department is pitching, towards the end of the year.
Speaking before the 32nd Visayas Area Business Conference (VABC) held at the pavilion of the Bellevue Hotel in Panglao, Usec. Sigue shared about Government’s Gameplan for Digitalization in the Visayas.
Earlier, she presented Infrastructure and connectivity, digital privacy and protection, policy and regulatory framework and digital skills gaps as the leading challenges in the country’s ICT development.
She highlighted that despite the archipelagic nature of the islands causing massive problems in laying out fiber optic connectivity, there have been leaps and bounds in recent years that presented greater IT-BPO opportunities for the Visayas.
That, coupled with the pandemic when IT-BPO industry workers were forced to return to the provinces, the displacement in workforce has presented the region with the digital skills that could be the region’s aces in the sleeves.
The growth of the IT-BPM in the Visayas region has Cebu leading with an estimated 200 thousand Full Time Employees (FTEs) employed in 24/7, Accenture, Alorica, Amazon, Cognizant, Concentrix, Conduent, EXL Service, IBM, JPMorgan, Optum, QBE, Shearwater, Sykes, Teleperformance, Teletech, Visayas KPO and Wipro.
In Ilo-ilo, an estimated 50 thousand FTEs are actively working in Alorica, Anthem Solutions, EXL Service, HGS, Inspiro, Legato, Reed, Elsevier, Startek, Teletech, Telus and Transcom.
Negros Oriental has also got 45 thousand FTEs working with Alorica, Anthem Solutions, Concentrix, Focus Direct, Grab Support, Teleperformance, Teletech, Transcom and Ubiquity.
Around 20 thousand FTEs are also in Inspiro, Straive and Teletech in Negros Oriental.
Bohol, with a recently available fiber-optic connectivity has TaskUs and Ibex employing nearly 10 thousand FTEs.
The DICT official also cited the region, pointing out that 2 of the six centers of excellence in the country’s next wave cities are Bacolod and Ilo-ilo, which are in the Visayas. Moreover, in the 7 identified next wave cities, Dumaguete City is there, while in the Digital Cities in 2025, Tagbilaran City is also there.
With about 1.5 million employees in the country’s IT-BPM industry at present, the opportunities in recent years has also pushed the DICT to strike while things are hot, and bring in another million jobs in the next seven months.
In the Visayas alone, with the presence of good training institutions and highly skilled manpower, the government sees a brighter future in creating more jobs in the CT-BPM.
She added that for every job opened in the IT-BPO causes some 5-7 indirect jobs.
With an additional one million jobs in the industry in the next 7 months, this would also mean some 5 to 7 million jobs that indirectly supply the needs of the new worker, and boost the economy, even in the Visayas. (rahc/PIA-7/Bohol)
