The acute skill mismatch in the labour-intensive BPO industry is spawning a whole new breed of BPO schools in the country.

NIIT with Genpact, has set up a JV, NIIT Institute of Process Excellence (NIPE) which has a mandate to train over 100,000 people in two years.
All of the top 15 Indian BPO firms are likely to join the initiative. Lathika Pai, co-founder of B2K, has just set up a BPO training outfit called Fides Global Consultants.

IGNOU will soon start offering, in alliance with Accenture, a diploma course to train students for jobs in the BPO industry.

Som Mittal, president, Nasscom, says BPO has migrated from vanilla tech support services to supply chain and high-end analytics; so industry needs people with vertical knowledge in insurance, supply chain and retail.

“The world over, even undergrad level people are trained for vocation. In India, on the contrary, even graduates are confused about what career to take up. People are increasingly realising that BPO is a serious career and offers limitless growth opportunity. It’s high time our academia revised the curricula and syllabi to include BPO courses,” said Mittal.

Ashish Basu, president of new business incubation at NIIT, said NIPE will open 200 BPO training centres in three years. Each of these centres will have 10 to 12 faculty members.

IGNOU will offer BPO courses to support practices in finance and accounting, insurance, banking, HR sourcing and category management, customer contact services, healthcare, pharma, engineering services and equity research.

“The BPO industry needs experts in areas like finance and legal matters. We are today forced sometimes to depend on college dropouts or 10th/12th pass people,” says Rincy Roosevelt of Sunbelt Business Solution.  Source