MikeLigalig.com

By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

The country’s business process outsourcing industry should maintain its high standards in spoken English training if it wants to stay ahead in the cutthroat global outsourced call center industry, a report said.

Quoting an Australian English language academic Paul Robertson, the report published in CallCentres.Net said poor English teaching methods could also lead to fewer Filipinos who could speak English fluently.

Speaking to Radio Australia News, Robertson was also quoted as saying that there are fewer English speakers outside of Metro Manila and Cebu.

“And if you do (find someone), local dialects impact on their English speaking. The Filipinos are just not equipped for this,” Roberston said in an interview with the Radio Australia News.

In the same interview, Robertson further described the Philippines’ spoken English teaching as “substandard”

“They want to be the world’s leader in call centers, sparking off India. But they are grabbing people ‘of the street’ who you and I couldn’t understand and giving them a few days training. It’s just not good enough,” Robertson said.

But Robertson, who has offices in Korea, Hong Kong and the Philippines, acknowledged that the Philippines has become “the Mecca of English language learning” in the Southeast Asian region in the last two years.

The Philippines’ BPO business is the fastest growing IT sector hiring nearly 500,000 people with over half of these in the call center business.

The Business Process Association of the Philippines (BPAP) expects the industry to grow between US$12 billion and US$13 billion by 2010.

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