BPO: The Big Potential Opportunity! 
ITeS is opening up a major employment opportunity for young Indians

By Sumit Chakraberty 

It's a common sight these days: young people flocking to call centers for jobs in IT-enabled services (ITeS). Recruitment is an ongoing activity, batch after batch being tested and interviewed. Walk-in interview ads dominate the employment pages in newspapers. 

Call centers cater to an international clientele and they need people with the right skills and attitude. It's also a fast-growing business: last year the Indian IT-enabled services industry recorded a growth rate of 60 percent plus in the middle of an economic recession. Recruitment is only the first step in the process. Thousands of fresh recruits have to be put through crash courses on their specific jobs on a continuous basis. 

Right now, the companies providing IT-enabled services are doing most of their own recruiting and training. But this will be hard to sustain as the numbers keep growing. 

The global business in IT-enabled services is expected to cross $ 600 billion in 2005. According to Nasscom-McKinsey estimates, the ITeS industry will create employment for over 1.1 million Indians by 2008. India is currently the preferred destination for this business because of the availability of large numbers of people with fluency in English and basic computing skills, and the relatively low cost of employing them in India. 

Analysts say India has the potential to get more than a third of the total business in IT-enabled services, which includes call centers. But to translate that potential into reality will require relevant manpower, especially trained for this market. 
 
NIIT Planetworkz: an eye on ITeS manpower
IT education leader NIIT has already geared up for building manpower resources for the burgeoning ITES/BPO industry. The company has launched Planetworkz, a new unit, specially targeted at creating skilled professionals for this emerging, hot growth, high potential segment.

Planetworkz, apart from providing the necessary training for job seekers in the ITES domain, has also launched an innovative proprietary technology called “Time Machine” to facilitate the remote selection of job seekers. Created by NIIT's Center for Research in Cognitive Systems (CRCS), the e-Recruitment Kiosk is designed to help ITES industry employers save valuable time and effort in finding the right candidates. Time Machine uses the power of the PC and the Internet to test a candidate's written English skills, analyze the voice quality, and evaluate his learning styles, even at remote NIIT Education centers. 

The technology, on the other side, helps career seekers in identifying the critical skills they require and the appropriate courses they need to enrol for, before embarking on a career in the fast growing ITES industry. 

NIIT Planetworkz is setting up the e-Recruitment Kiosks across its vast network of Education Centres in India, giving thousands of career aspirants a direct connect to job opportunities in the ITES industry. 

NIIT’s training initiatives in the ITES space will help India realize its full potential in the global ITES/BPO industry and enable the country to tackle the problem of unemployment in the future.

(Sumit Chakraberty is an independent technology writer-schakraberty@yahoo.com)

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