Fresh graduates of the senior high school (SHS) program may be unfit for contact center/business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs, an official of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) has revealed.
“I’ll be very direct. Not enough — they are not yet ready,” said Haidee Enriquez, president of CCAP and CEO of MicroSourcing, in a media roundtable in Makati City on Wednesday.
Enriquez said the government, particularly the Department of Education (DepEd), should amend the current Senior High School curriculum to adapt to the ever-changing business landscape, particularly with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI).
“The senior HS curriculum needs to be enhanced or revised to incorporate more industry immersion/OJT and industry-relevant content. We have published the Phil Skills Framework for the IT-BPM industry, so the competencies outlined there should be incorporated in the design of the senior high school tracks,” she told DAILY TRIBUNE in a separate interview.
Enriquez said the current attrition rate in the contact center industry stands at 43 percent, but noted that most employees aren’t leaving the field — they’re simply moving between companies within the sector.
She said the primary headwind faced by the contact center industry is the talent and skills gap, which they are trying to resolve with the help of their partners — the academe and the government.
“The other headwind is that there are more and more locations that want to be like the Philippines, or the other competing markets, which gives our members a hard time in generating and attracting new clients,” Enriquez told reporters.
For her part, Tonichi Achurra Parekh, CCAP board director and Concentrix vice president for service delivery, said that a senior high school graduate’s ability to learn quickly is key to landing a job in the contact center industry.
“We have a (really) different generation of workers and students. Their levels may be different from what we truly assess because of the technology available to them. It is indeed about their ability to learn,” she said.
In a Senate hearing last month, the Philippine Statistics Authority said that roughly 18.96-million Filipino junior and senior high school students could not read and understand a simple story in 2024, adding that 79 percent of senior high school graduates are functionally literate, while 21 percent are considered illiterate despite graduating from high school.
Phl still No. 1
Meanwhile, Enriquez said the Philippines continues to hold its spot as the top destination for digital customer experience and healthcare services — sectors where the country’s market share keeps growing steadily.
“We are number one when it comes to customer service satisfaction among the global capability centers. We are number two when it comes to digital IT services and the creative industry. However, we are continuously growing,” Enriquez said.
Contact centers generated $31.6 billion, or 83 percent, of the IT-BPM industry’s total $38 billion in revenue last year.
Employment also rose, reaching 1.62-million workers in 2024, an 11-percent jump from the 1.51 million in 2023. The contact center workforce represents 89 percent of the total IT-BPM jobs.
Enriquez remains optimistic about hitting the industry’s ambitious $49-billion revenue goal by 2028, aiming for an average annual growth rate of 8.5 percent until then.
For 2025, she said the sector is projected to grow by 5 percent to 7 percent, which translates to an additional $1.58 billion in revenue.
“In a pulse survey conducted a month ago on the Philippines’ competitiveness, the majority of our members believe that we will continue our leadership as the number one contact center destination in the world and we will continue to grow,” she said.
The CCAP to date has 167 BPO member firms.
