RP rapidly losing edge in English
by Tina Arceo–Dumlao

Call centers and business process outsourcing offices have sprouted like mushrooms all over the metropolis.

But is it getting more and more difficult to fill up the seats.

The culprit is the deteriorating quality of most Filipinos’ spoken English, such that only about three out of 100 applicants and an estimated 2 percent of college graduates will likely land a job in a call center.

The acceptance rate among call center firms has even dropped from 3-7 percent to as low as one percent.

Carol Dominguez, President of Human Resources consulting firm John Clements Consultants, Inc., says this decline has to be addressed immediately if the Philippines is to grab a big chunk of the jobs that would continue to move out of the United States and Europe.

“We still have the edge but we are losing it. We must do something about it,” Dominguez tells Business Monday.

John Clements is doing its part by creating and offering training courses on polishing English skills.

It also developed a scale to measure English proficiency using a 1-7 scale, with 7 being a native English speaker.

John Clements is also working with schools and universities, such as the University of Sto. Tomas, St. Paul’s College and San Beda College, to include the English training course in their curriculum.

The executive search and staffing company even helped launch a “Speak English Only” campaign to promote speaking English at all times – from home, to school, to the office.

John Clements knows these difficulties with getting qualified employees first hand as it is one of the leading providers of call center agents and BPO offices in the country.

It has been in the search business for 30years and has been working to help the outsourcing community meet the acute need for qualified personnel.

Rocky Peltzman, John Clements’s Consultant for the English courses, says the easiest way to master the language is to not just speak in English, but think in English.

“If you watch local programs, you think in the local language. As I do the oral English screening of applicants, it is almost as if I can see applicants’ brains thinking in their native language and translating in nanoseconds to English. To speak good English, you’ve got to think in English,” Peltzman stresses.

Based on John Clements’s experience, the common pitfalls include the misuse of pronouns, plural and singular terms, past and future tenses and gender.

Analyzing the Filipino language further revealed that the language has no structure unlike the English language. Letters like F and V do no exist. Subjects are pluralized but verbs are not, hence the inappropriate use of “is” and “are”. There is no use of gender, hence the inappropriate use of “he” and “she”, Dominguez says.

She adds that the verb is usually in the present tense, unless the word “yesterday” or “tomorrow” is added to the sentence.

There are also problems with the correct use of American idioms and lack of confidence in answering the phone.

Dominguez says concerned groups and citizens must get together to upgrade English skills as the call center and BPO businesses are the best thing to happen in the economy in the past years.

The Philippine call center industry is already doubling every year.

From 65 today, including Sykes, Convergys, Teletech, Sitel and e-Telecare, the number of call center firms is expected to go up to 130 by 2005.

The migration of jobs is not about to stop as more American firms seek to cut costs by transferring non-core operations overseas.

The Gartner group estimates that the offshore business will be worth $62 billion by 2008, and as many as 3.3 million while-collar jobs are likely to migrate to countries with lower labor cost by 2015.

Dominguez says the prospects are bright and not just in call centers.

There is also great potential in developing the Philippines’ reputation in medical transcription, animation, information technology, accounting, data management and engineering design.

She says there are three main requirements for the Philippines to cash in on the irreversible trend: English, English, English.

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This article was originally published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on November 15, 2004.
Reprinted with permission.