Business process outsourcing firm Accenture is creating another 5,000 jobs in the Philippines this year to add to its 20,000 employees, as the company gains more clients from different parts of the world.
Local Accenture officials said the company's expansion would mirror the local outsourcing sector's outlook for the year and its target of a double-digit growth.
"Right now, we have more than 20,000 employees in the Philippines. Last year was a very good year for us," Accenture Philippines BPO operations head Benedict Hernandez said in an interview.
"We should be up to 25,000 before the end of the year," he said. Last year alone, he said the company was able to bring about 4,000 new jobs, making it one of the country's biggest BPO firms.
About half of the company's workforce in the Philippines is engaged in technology consulting. The other half is in other sub-contracted services such as call-center work, finance, accounting and healthcare.
Unlike other big BPOs in the Philippines, Hernandez said call-center workers did not make up the bulk of Accenture's workforce.
"What's good about us is 90 percent of our BPO portfolio is in higher-value, non-voice BPO operations," he said. Accenture's call-center operations have only 1,000 workers.
"If you look at other significant players in the Philippines, they do mostly call-center work. Our advantage is that we have the capability to grow in other professions," he said.
Hernandez said Accenture, having diversified from simple call-center operations to higher-value outsourced jobs, should be considered a model of "what a BPO company in the Philippines can become."
This is in line with the industry stakeholders' goal of moving up the value chain by focusing more on services like animation, publishing, legal research and the like, instead of just on call centers.
The local BPO sector currently has 600,000 employees. By 2015, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines expects this number to grow to about 1.3 million.
