Cebu’s graduates have abilities that are at par with international standards for business process outsourcing (BPO), according to the results of a study on
A skills assessment conducted by CIBI Information showed that there was a 7.4 percent gap in verbal abilities between those who are still studying and those who are already in the industry.
However, CIBI executive vice president Jonathan Defensor de Luzuriaga, in a recent presentation, showed that the analytical abilities of local students were just 1.3 percent lower than the highest ranked scores of those already working in BPO centers in
Students scored 50 percent in verbal abilities while those in the industry scored 57.4 percent. In analytical abilities, students scored 45.9 percent, just a little lower than the industry’s score of 47.7 percent.
Service providers are mainly concerned with the relationship between what the local academe produces and the needs of the industry.
A gap between the “graduating talent pool and the employable talent pool” has been observed by service providers, especially those offering high end services such as knowledge process outsourcing (KPO).
They used a customized skills assessment suite to measure various skills sets related to outsourcing.
These included verbal abilities, analytical abilities, attention to detail, quantitative abilities and programming.
The respondents from the industry were those who were newly hired by BPO, KPO and ITO (information technology outsourcing) companies with a year or less experience.
The respondents from the academe were graduating students who took up courses that were matched with the industry.
De Luzuriaga said these figures would show that it is not impossible to bridge the gap between those produced by the academe and those already in the industry.
He also said that the gap implies that at the recruitment stage, hiring managers have to search for applicants with higher verbal skills than what the academe is able to produce.
He said there is still room to improve verbal skills training on the part of the academe to address this gap.
As for analytical abilities, the score
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