Manpower & skills survey
by Blogie • 9 April 2007
Aside from the two well-publicized contact centers in Davao — Gcom and Link2Support — there apparently are a few more now operating in the city. A friend recently brought to my attention one of these low-key BPO operators; he works there and he said there were only 10 of them in active duty. I was surprised that there was another call center that seems to have passed below the radar, and that my friend turned out to be skilled in this area of expertise. Which re-emphasized to me a weakness in Davao’s I.T. industry: we have no definitive skills survey available until now.
Ever since my colleagues and I organized ourselves for the first time in 1998, we’ve been talking about this need. But up until now we still haven’t come up with a complete matrix of Davao’s I.T.-related skills vis-a-vis available and projected number of manpower. This lack, I believe, is one stumbling block to the local industry’s efforts in successfully promoting Davao as an I.T. outsourcing and investment destination.
We’ve had a number of I.T. organizations that have come and gone, and now we have the ICT Davao umbrella organization, which aims to take up the cudgels from its predecessors. Hopefully it will succeed in establishing the framework needed to shed light on the skill sets present here, the number of I.T. practitioners we actually have in and around the city. One thing that the ICT Davao must realize, however, is that this endeavor will require serious resources, not to mention a huge commitment. Otherwise, it won’t prosper — it’ll just fall by the wayside as before.
Accomplishing this skills survey isn’t as simple as counting heads either. For one thing, it has to be done in light of present-day global requirements (e.g., figuring out how many Dabawenyos can, say, program in Turbo Pascal might not be imperative). In other words, the survey must be formulated and executed professionally, in order to ultimately arrive at figures that will truly be usable.
What exactly can Davao’s I.T. industry offer the world at large? This is for marketing purposes. Let’s drill down to specific, project-level concerns: How many I.T. engineers skilled in, for example, C++ can we field for a particular offshore development project? And for how long?
Somebody once remarked that it’s a chicken-and-egg question, this skills availability problem. That we should simply wait for when the requirements are made known to us. This sentiment is utterly flawed. This is, in fact, a case when we can say for certain that the egg comes first.
What can Davao’s I.T. promoters sell in the global marketplace? Whom should we target as our potential clients, suppliers, partners? How long will we be able to sustain what types of marketing activities? What direction should I.T. educators follow in order to produce trained-up and ready-to-deploy manpower?
These, and then some, are the questions that should occupy the minds of the formulators of this much-needed and long-overdue Davao I.T. Skills Survey.
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