Academe calls for training assistance from industries

CEBU, Philippines - In its effort to provide highly-employable graduates especially to the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies, the academe is calling on industry players to help them train graduating students.

On top of the traditional OJT (On-the-Job-Training), the academe is now asking industry players to provide one or two technical personnel to be deployed in the school, to provide extensive overview of the different technical skills requirement mostly needed by BPO companies today.

Cebu Educational Development for Information Technology (CEDFIT) academe-sector board member Gregg Gabison said if industry players can only sacrifice part of their resources in coaching the near-graduate students, scarcity of highly qualified technical people for BPOs can be avoided in Cebu.

Because of this effort though, there are already a number of BPO companies operating in Cebu that have responded to this call, “but only a few of them.”

According to Gabison, with the help of Cedfit and full cooperation of the BPO players, the academe-industry gap will be resolved in Cebu.

He said only about 30 percent of the BPO companies, specifically those that are in software development, animation, digital imaging, and other sophisticated technical applications are reaching out to the academe sector to help students learn new skills in the industry.

Because of the broad spectrum in IT, most schools’ will only provide the basic learning for the students, highly technical, and various specific applications can be introduced to students through industry-mentoring strategy, Gabison said.

“There are active industry players that come to us to offer their resources. They help us in coming up with curriculum to fit their specific needs,” Gabison said.

Cebu, being positioned as the next “Innovation Island” in Asia, needs this kind of stronger collaboration between industry and academe, Gabison said.

He said unlike the OJT program, which companies have the choice to deploy the interns to the real job, or not, the industry-academe mentoring program, will give students the full orientation and learning of the on-site operation.

Information Technology graduates, and those that are specializing the other skills, like programming, computer engineering, and others have already acquired basic learning on the course, but they need to be updated and be fully oriented on the real-site operation, away from theories.

Gabison believes that the academe will gain full support from the industry players Cebu will be able to easily achieve its bid becoming an “Innovation Island”, thereby pushing the province being an emerged BPO destination in the world, from number one “emerging” BPO destination.

Earlier, economist Ramon M. Quesada said that Cebu could capture a large number of BPO and high-value investments in the Information, Communication Technology (ICT), if it were to immediately address the lack of software developer or software engineer supply in the province.

In terms of voice and back-office services, Cebu and other provinces in Central Visayas combined had been able to overtake India, in terms of investors’ interest. But this potential can be doubled if Cebu, having the large number of colleges and universities in Southern Philippines, will develop a good pool of software engineers and developers.

“What we lack is a good advantage in software development,” he said adding that this strength is still being held by India.