Let’s face it, gone are the days that Filipinos are known to have above-par English language skills to be more competitive than our Asian neighbors. Just observe how the Koreans are leeching us of our English in exchange for Php100 an hour. Still, we’re lucky enough to be a BPO hub.

And Inquirer.net reports that we’ll have a shortage of BPO workers despite the numerous graduates we churn out each year. So what does a college degree mean nowadays. Curse those diploma mills and substandard education.

I do have personal reservations about call centers. The work’s too impersonal. It’s like being a human answering machine. I find little difference between that and that Matrix thing where everyone’s just hooked to wires and machines.

Anyway,with even such easy-to-land jobs there are high turnover and attrition rates. Lack of technical, communication, and soft skills are killing our progress.

I mean in terms of the bigger picture, BPOs have kept us afloat for some time with dollars and foreign capital funding our poor economy. But have done anything to maximize such opportunities? Nada. Even our own education policies still do not fully support the development of ICT and language skills. (Though Sec. Jesli Lapus have made strides to revisit language policies since assuming position.)

From what I see is that we have “industrialized” our education system too much. It’s not about developing life-long scholars in the process. We just farm out graduates in hopes for them to land some job here in BPOs or abroad. We’re like a factory producing cheap (in both raw materials and processing) products. But in the long run, quality suffers, making the investment good only for shorter periods. Much like those cheap daylight fluorescent bulbs you can buy at tiangges. 3 for Php 100 but good for a month and a half. (Yeah, and you risk short circuits and fires too).

Check out these other posts:

1. English language teaching and church hymns
2. ICT learning in the Philippines lacks ICT
3. Call center con-text
4. Will blogging for literacy work in the Philippine context?
5. Benchmarking the graduate