BPO employees go to school once again

The most interesting and wonderful trend adopted by the Business process outsourcing companies is to upgrade and hone the skills of their employees by tying up with management institutes. This strategy could work well to retain the talent, because the attrition rates are very high, almost 30-40% every year.

BPO firms like Transworks for example has tied up with Mumbai's Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies and the Institute of Chartered & Financial Analysts of India. Another example has Sitel India has tied up with Mumbai's L N Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research. This is a new trend, which is catching up fast with the corporates, where in they outsource their training to professional institutes.

It is given that whoever comes in for BPO jobs are young graduates who look to pursue higher studies along with their job, but since they are not able to cope up with the time or work pressures, they quit and that is the particular reason why attrition are so high in this industry and hence such an arrangement will work wonders for the employees. According to the institutes, they have designed a course that particularly caters to the BPO industry. Yet it will have all the inherent features of a MBA course.

But the important thing is that the office timings should be such that, it should allow these executives to pursue their education with their work, and that's exactly what these BPO firms are doing. This seems to be just an experiment to check whether this move reduces the high attrition rate this BPO industry is known for. If it works it may be the way to go for other call centers also.