Aside from the two well-publicized contact centers in Davao — Gcom and Link2Support — there apparently are a few more now operating in the city. A friend recently brought to my attention one of these low-key BPO operators; he works there and he said there were only 10 of them in active duty. I was surprised that there was another call center that seems to have passed below the radar, and that my friend turned out to be skilled in this area of expertise. Which re-emphasized to me a weakness in Davao’s I.T. industry: we have no definitive skills survey available until now.
Ever since my colleagues and I organized ourselves for the first time in 1998, we’ve been talking about this need. But up until now we still haven’t come up with a complete matrix of Davao’s I.T.-related skills vis-a-vis available and projected number of manpower. This lack, I believe, is one stumbling block to the local industry’s efforts in successfully promoting Davao as an I.T. outsourcing and investment destination.
We’ve had a number of I.T. organizations that have come and gone, and now we have the ICT Davao umbrella organization, which aims to take up the cudgels from its predecessors. Hopefully it will succeed in establishing the framework needed to shed light on the skill sets present here, the number of I.T. practitioners we actually have in and around the city. One thing that the ICT Davao must realize, however, is that this endeavor will require serious resources, not to mention a huge commitment. Otherwise, it won’t prosper — it’ll just fall by the wayside as before.
Accomplishing this skills survey isn’t as simple as counting heads either. For one thing, it has to be done in light of present-day global requirements (e.g., figuring out how many Dabawenyos can, say, program in Turbo Pascal might not be imperative). In other words, the survey must be formulated and executed professionally, in order to ultimately arrive at figures that will truly be usable.
What exactly can Davao’s I.T. industry offer the world at large? This is for marketing purposes. Let’s drill down to specific, project-level concerns: How many I.T. engineers skilled in, for example, C++ can we field for a particular offshore development project? And for how long?
Somebody once remarked that it’s a chicken-and-egg question, this skills availability problem. That we should simply wait for when the requirements are made known to us. This sentiment is utterly flawed. This is, in fact, a case when we can say for certain that the egg comes first.
What can Davao’s I.T. promoters sell in the global marketplace? Whom should we target as our potential clients, suppliers, partners? How long will we be able to sustain what types of marketing activities? What direction should I.T. educators follow in order to produce trained-up and ready-to-deploy manpower?
These, and then some, are the questions that should occupy the minds of the formulators of this much-needed and long-overdue Davao I.T. Skills Survey.
[...] Manpower skills survey [...]
I think you could go to CHED XI and ask for their data on graduates… i went their last year
Shouldn’t be that difficult because they’re your neighbors *snicker*
That’s a start. Actually I have been able to get data from CHED before, and they were very helpful. But again, this endeavor must be approached with a plan already on hand. It’s going to take more than just going to a data repository and asking for printouts or soft copies. Like I said, hoop old boy, we must know what data will be relevant. And besides, I believe it is imperative for the industry to generate fresh data, not just glean from existing databases, which are sure to be outdated anyway, or too disorganized.
Blog, I believe it is just as important to know what the demands are of our target market. Doing this in line with learning about the city’s competencies will allow us to align the two environments (internal and external) more effectively. To merely understand our city’s competencies is insufficient. Any promotional activity based solely on that will have a lesser chance of succeeding than a promotion based on what we know about ourselves as well as what we know about our target market.
However, I agree with you that the skills survey shouldn’t wait until the requirements of the market is known. That’s too inefficient. Drawing on strategic planning literature and practice, internal environment analysis (strengths and weaknesses) as well as external environment analysis (threats and opportunities) are best–and should be–done hand in hand because a) one provides insights on the analysis of the other and vise versa and b) these two are necessary in the strategy formulation and selection activity.
On the other hand, this further increases the resource requirements on ICT Davao (or whoever is responsible for this environment analysis). Then again, I would imagine that the pay-off would make the endeavor more than worth it.
Regarding the issue that you raised about how best to approach this study, perhaps we can use some of the tools of strategic planning as a starting point. Namely: PEST analysis; Value Chain; IFE; EFE; QSPM; etc. I wouldn’t recommend using them immediately though since they might be designed exclusively for corporations (I say “might” because I haven’t had the chance to use it in a context outside a corporate entity). Rather, I’m recommending them as a starting point. Perhaps they will lead you to analysis frameworks and tools that are better suited for the job at hand. Also, Michael E. Porter’s work titled “The Competitive Advantage of Nations” may provide some insights.