Lack of skilled manpower impedes call centre growth

Skilled manpower shortage, caused by lack of publicity, impedes the growth of Dhaka’s new call centre industry. Industry sources said the city’s call centres could create ‘white-collar jobs’ for over 30,000 graduates in two to three years if the government was supportive.

Young graduates, who can fluently speak in English with the correct accent need to be interested to the job, SM Iftekhar, managing director of MCL Hotline Bangladesh, told New Age on the sidelines of the ICT fair in city’s Bangabandhu International Conference Centre. The two-day fair ended Wednesday. The young, he said, could not be drawn by the call centres. Only publicity could do it, he said.
Only 41 call centres are operating in the city of Dhaka, although approximately 450 entrepreneurs took licences from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission in last two years to open the centres, Iftekhar said. Over 1,000 young men and women now work with the 41 call centres, which can employ 4,000 youths, he said.
It needs huge publicity to attract the boys and girls out of the universities as well as the English-medium schools in the city, most of whom are unaware of what they can do, he said. He requested the government to actively support the growth of the industry, a potential earner of foreign currency for the country.
Students visited the stall of the Bangladesh Association of Call Centre and Outsourcing at the ICT fair to know whether or not they offer employment opportunities.
The BACCO stall gave presentations on how call centre service is outsourced by multi-national companies from the Philippines, India, the West Indies, Bangladesh and other countries. It also showed how Bangladesh and other countries were switching to IT and other high-tech services and how Bangladesh could better exploit the offshore market.
But many students did not know about the fair, as it was not well publicised, said an executive at the Gplex call centre. ‘We saw a lot of enthusiasm among the students who visited our stall,’ he said.
‘Call centres have emerged as a new foreign currency earning sector with a possibility of generating over five lakhs jobs in two to three years. But we are facing some obstacles. We need some good English-speaking graduates for running the call centres,’ Abul Khair, acting president of BACCO, told New Age.
He also said, ‘Bangladesh is connected only with one submarine cable. Our foreign clients cannot depend on us as we do not have the back-up. We would request the government to get the country connected with another submarine cable as early as possible and with V-SAT to ensure uninterrupted connection.’
The call centres in Dhaka mainly work for the companies based in the UK, Canada and Australia.
The job responsibilities include selling products, verifying international credit cards, campaigning for new product sales, booking hotel rooms and even selling laptops.
In addition to outsourcing services globally, the industry is eying to grab Tk 500 crore worth of services from the domestic market.
The BTRC allowed setting up of call centres in April 2008. The business started picking up this year.
The government decided to establish call centres in the rural areas to create employment opportunities in the countryside.
A study showed that call centre sales grew in Bangladesh by 10 percent a year, compared to India’s 89 per cent, Brazil’s 38 per cent and Poland’s 23 per cent in 2007.