While the revenues of Indian IT-BPO companies have been growing steadily, costs of training have also been rising dramatically over the past few years - thanks to high attrition and low employability! Today, the soaring training costs have emerged as one of the most significant cost centers for BPOs.

Most vendors have realized that the current Indian educational system is ineffective in meeting the demand for quality manpower. Thus, large part of the training provided by IT-BPO companies deals with training people to a minimum quality standard. The common prerequisites for entry level services across domains coupled with the ease of isolating training requirement has created opportunities for outsourcing of training activities.

Monetizing training…?

In the constantly evolving IT-BPO and knowledge services industry; learning, unlearning and relearning has become a norm. Driven by this need, Indian IT-BPO companies have invested significant amounts for training their manpower resources across levels. However, as margins fall and price emerges as the key differentiator, "investments" to build best of the breed talent are increasingly being viewed as costs amongst smaller companies. On the other hand, some of the leading IT-BPO companies have been trying to do what they are best at - converting "costs" into opportunities. Recently, some IT-BPO companies have taken various approaches towards tackling the training issue.

 Source: ValueNotes Research

IGNOU and Accenture are trying to strengthen BPO as a career option, while trying to monetize the training opportunity. Today, the 10 year old BPO industry is largely looked upon as a stop gap arrangement or a stepping stone by many aspirants. A formalized course by a reputed and above all "recognized" university in India may help infuse some legitimacy, if not quality, within the training process.

Apart from the above initiatives, there are stand alone firms like Fides Global, Hero Mindmine etc. that are focused on providing outsourced training to IT-BPO companies. Third-party training providers can significantly reduce training costs for large IT-BPO companies, but customer specific processes that form the next level of training cannot be outsourced to these players. While increasing focus on training would mean deviating from "core" for the large companies, there are not enough third party providers that can handle the training volumes for these companies. With the demand for new recruits slowing down there is a greater propensity to pass training costs to recruits. NASSCOM is also trying to drive initiatives in BPO education. Although it's still an employers' market, with growing stake in converting "qualified" manpower into "billable"- it would be interesting to see who pays for the ever increasing training cost - Recruits or recruiters?