BPO, ITeS center starts in Saurashtra-Kutch

Speaking to Business Standard Haresh Tank, director said, "This training centre would extensively focus on improvising the language expertise as required to avail job in Business Process Outsourcing/Offshoring (BPO) and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) organisations across the nation."

Tank said, "The verbal communication skillset, especially among the natives of the region despite being educated in the english medium, one can find an impact of native accent or dialect spoken here. As a result, despite ample opportunities in BPO/ITES sector, hardly any candidates of Saurashtra-Kutch region are able to make way in this profession."

The candidates have to priliminarily work in back-office or customers services areas, dealing with customers from across the globe.

To interact with international customers, emphasis is on excelling language skills for US, UK, Australian and Canadian accent, which will be taught here, Tank added.

"By initiating this venture, we at the laboratory will be able to extract the dialect impact from the students, polish their speech and language by extensively focussing on standarisating voice and accent as required by various BPOs/ITES companies across the country, today," Tank said.

Explaining on the need to establish such a state-of-the-art language laboratory in a Saurashtra-Kutch region, H P Joshi, technical director said, "We got the inspiration to venture into this virgin business area after attending the last NASSCOM event. As far as Saurashtra-Kutch region and Rajkot are concerned, there are not adequate facilities available here to train workforce for this particular profession."

Further Joshi said, "According to the latest NASSCOM survey, India's share in outsourcing business would be 17 billion US dollars by 2009, in which the major thrust area would be call centres and customers service opportunities. This would generate additional employment opportunity for 10 lakh graduates under-graduates per annum in this particular sector only, if they are armed with requisite skillset of having competitive communication capabilities and computing. We are going to train them in this language laboratory and let them explore, further professional probabilities in BPO/ITES sector."

However, BPO/ITES industry in metro cities is facing problem of attrition rate along with skyrocketing expenses. So such companies are targeting set-ups in small cities like Rajkot too, where adequate trained manpower can be made available, attrition rate is pretty low.

Infrastructure facilities are at par with any metro city and expenses can also be curtailed by spreading operations in such small scale destinations, Joshi added.

Bhartendu Purohit, academic director said, "Till now we have received 225 inquiries from the candidates wishing to avail admissions in our call centre training course."

We are going phase by phase, our batch for Communicative English has already started, we are starting 1st batch of Call Centre Training from 1st June and our TOEFL and IELTS batches shall start from 15th June. Presently we have facility to accommodate 30 students in one single batch, he added.

The course will be spread from two months to four months with different timing patterns ranging from 2-3 hours on daily basis. The pricing range is of Rs.9,500 to Rs.19,500 based on the selection of the course, explains Purohit.

As far as training candidates for various global communication patterns especially voice and accent is concerned, we are going to have video-conferencing from experts from across the world, says Purohit.

Speaking on the placement possibilities and future course of action in this direction, Haresh Tank said, "We are presently in process of negotiating placement perspective for our students with 25 Top notch BPO/ITES companies across the country. Especially those at Noida, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai, Pune and Hyderabad. Once, we materialise the tie-up, this companies would go for a placement by testing our students according to their parameters, on completion of the course from our institute and get them recruited, provided they qualify company specified parameters."

Apart from that, we as a company are also planning to bring BPO/ITES facility in Rajkot, especially outsourcing the banking and finance customer service operations, so we would also be one possible employment generators for the brass we train, again it would be subject to their qualifying, said Tank.