Digital sourcing opportunities growing in the sector

Jamaica has been making significant progress in future-proofing and upskilling its workforce, particularly those in the business processing outsourcing (BPO) sector.

The island has been executing programmes directed at moving up the value chain to more knowledge process outsourcing such as medical, human resources, legal services and app and software development. The country has showed that digital transformation in Jamaica is less about technology and more about people having the right skills to use it.

Fabrizio Opertti, integration and trade sector manager at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), is commending Jamaica on its programme of upskilling the talent in its BPO sector. 

He made the point that to fully capitalise on technological revolutions in the global marketplace, Jamaica is undergoing ambitious programmes for improving the productivity of its workforce.

The IDB official cited the example of the Jamaican BPO workforce more than doubling from 15,000 to 31,000 over the five years before 2018, noting that the industry has continued to see significant growth in the past five years.

Upskilling talent in the BPO sector

Historically, Jamaica has been associated with call center operations, which usually require lower skill sets but the government is pushing upskilling the talent in the sector to take advantages of the opportunities opening up in digital sourcing. The increased use of data, automation and new technologies such as artificial intelligence is reshaping how the future of work will look like for the global services industry, including the skills required to succeed in it.

The lobby group for the BPO sector in Jamaica is the Global Services Association of Jamaica.

The association’s president, Gloria Henry states that the, “Jamaican authorities and business community have understood this trend and the importance of continuously updating the skill set of the work force to suit future needs. We have established the Global Services Skills Council (GSSC), with a mandate of working with a broad network of training institutions and industrial experts to take their inputs and recommendations and include them in order to prepare our talent to fill the vacuum in areas of need”.

GSS project at a glance

The GSS Project, is an IDB-funded programme directed at upskilling and preparing workers for higher-end jobs in areas such as Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), and Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO). The GSS Project in Jamaica uses a career pathway framework to coordinate sector-wide upskilling.

Despite minor delays during the first months of the pandemic, the GSS Project had promoted the development of a digital skills curriculum, completed a gender diagnosis report, and developed initiatives to promote exports and increase investments. It is expected that the project will complete the career pathway framework, an apprenticeship programme, the GSS Information Platform, and train 6,000 people using the digital skills curriculum by the end of 2021. 

Beyond the GSS, the Jamaican government and private companies have been advancing other programmes to train people in areas such as coding. These kinds of projects are rapidly changing the capabilities of the Jamaican workforce and elevating the profile of the island as a software outsourcing destination.