M ALAYBALAY CITY (MindaNews/07 July) — The City Government of Malaybalay intends to open the city to business process outsourcing firms, city administrator-designate Allan Ronolo said.
Ronolo said the new administration of Mayor Ignacio W. Zubiri has identified call centers as an employment driver for the people of Malaybalay.
He said Zubiri will formalize the campaign to invite BPO firms to locate in Malaybalay City, citing the city’s advantage in meeting requirements for call centers like telecommunication requirements, electric power, and cheap land.
But the city’s major asset, Ronolo said, is the presence of qualified and available human resources who could work in BPOs.
He said the city government is looking at centers as a potential employer.
Ronolo said the city government intends to attract more investors.
“But they all have to be good employment generators, not just any business,” Ronolo said.
He said the new mayor has already started campaigning for BPO locators in his functions in Manila
In 2009, University of Immaculate Conception Prof. Melquiades R. Hayag Jr, said the province of Bukidnon has the foundation for call centers and medical transcription firms as all schools offering IT in the province have sent their IT teachers to further study like Master’s degree in Information Technology.
”These are ground works for better capacity of the province to accommodate IT companies and ICT outsourcing firms (call centers and medical transcriptions),” he said.
Hayag said one of the reasons of the students’ competence is that Bukidnon’s academic institutions are catching up in their IT programs. He cited the infrastructure backbone being put up by a telecommunications company for the fiber optic technology boosting prospects for better broadband internet service.
He said the upgrade of teachers impacts on the readiness of the province to provide quality IT manpower to address the world wide trend on the role of IT.
In 2008, Sabetsu, which described itself as a Philippine-based data entry service provider located in the city.
Among their “strong backbone” based on a webpage of the firm is offshore staffing, furnishing services covering web designing, search engine optimization, web mastering, PHP programming, HTML programming, web content writing, graphics editing, cartoons and animation, video editing, telemarketing and other customary services required from US, UK and Australian clients. (Walter I. Balane/MindaNews)
