THE IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (Ibpap) said it is banking on healthcare, financial services and contact center sectors as it eyes a 7-percent growth in jobs for 2024.
Ibpap President Jack Madrid told reporters on the sidelines of the Philippine Economic Zone Authority’s (Peza) Investors’ Night last week, “We added 130,000 jobs this year. That’s year-end additional jobs so the total will be 1.7 million.”
The IT and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) industry is targeting to reach 1.7 million full-time employees (FTEs) and US$35.4 billion in revenue by the end of 2023
The 130,000 new jobs this year, the Ibpap head said, is equivalent to 8.7 percent growth in headcount.
Madrid explained that November and December are “high-growth” months since employers hire more during the Christmas season.
The Ibpap chief also reported that of the 1.1 additional jobs it aims to create by 2028, “So far we’ve done 300,000 so we have 800,000 to go.”
The sectors that have contributed to the industry’s growth this year, Madrid said, are health care, banking and finance, and contact center.
The same set of sectors is expected to drive the growth of the industry for 2024, he added.
With the contact center accounting for 60 percent of the size of the IT-BPM industry, Madrid said the Philippines remains to be the “leading” cog in the sub-sector.
He pointed out, “We don’t have a problem with demand. There’s a lot of demand for the Philippines,” adding, however, that the challenge still lies in the supply of more employees.
In September 2023, Madrid expressed confidence that the industry is on track to reach 1.7 million FTEs by the end of the year despite it having “more demanding” job requirements for job seekers and graduates.
“We started in 2023 with 1.57 million and I would say that we are on track to touch 1.7 million by the end of 2023,” Madrid said in a televised interview in September.
Based on the IT-BPM Roadmap 2028, the industry is eyeing to provide jobs to 2.5 million full-time employees by the end of 2028.
With the industry’s goal of attaining the said employment target for the year, Madrid explained the issue on demand-supply talent gap that the IT-BPM currently faces.
“The reason for the gap is that there really is a very big demand curve, that’s one. Second, the supply of employable talents in this increasingly competitive job market is not quite enough. And the second reason that I want to cite is that while we have almost 800,000 college graduates, there is a skills gap that has resulted in a job skills mismatch,” the IBPAP head earlier explained. (Full story here: https://businessmirror.com.ph/2023/09/21/it-bpm-jobs-on-track-to-reach-1-7m-by-yearend/)