A career path in a BPO is the most incomplete information that even the employee working in the organization has.It is not because this information is inaccessible or,unavailable, rather it is because of the unwillingness shown by the employee to extract this information.Unlike in the other industries, growth in a BPO is fast and avenues are many.In the other industries, a promotion is something that happens once in 5-6 years and the options available to you are limited.Hence the need to gather information is very less, Whereas in a BPO you have multiple options of growth. Lets discuss what these options are.
Before we understand the growth options we have, lets discuss what are the departments in a normal BPO, where you can look forward to move into.A BPO has departments like the following that would provide employees an option of growth.
- Call center Operations (CCO, in short)
- Hiring
- Process engineering
- Data analysis
- Quality assurance
Certain BPOs have a hierarchy in grades and certain other in designations.We will only discuss the ones that have a hierarchy in designations for a clearer understanding.
The normal hierarchy is as follows:
- Head of department
- Manager – Operations
- Dy.Manager – Operations
- Asst. Manager – Operations
- Team leaders
- Asst. Team leaders
- Sr.Representatives
- Representatives
There are other hierarchies that are specific to certain organizations and we would not include them here.Some of the above mentioned designations like , “Dy.Manager” and “Asst.Team Leader” are again designations that doesn’t feature in certain BPOs.
Growth to a Sr.Representative is not based on interviews but is based on the tenure in an organization.But all other designations have an interview-based screening.A dedicated and hard-working employee with the minimum required skills should be promoted to the position of a team leader in about an year.This will again depend on individual performances. Similarly the growth to an Asst.Manager should again take another year and a half. The best part of all this is that positions like Asst.Manager and Manager-Operations involve handling huge teams and the employees are groomed to develop into these roles.These kind of grooming and learning is something that has made the BPOs stand-out from the rest of the industries.
Almost all of the departments will have a similar kind of hierarchy except that there would be no roles called “Representatives” and “Sr.Representatives” there. What are the functions of these departments could be a point of discussion in another post.
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For the benefit of young people who have little knowledge of the real world out there I want to share a few inputs:
1. BPO’s require a very little specialized skill apart from the person’s ability to communicate in English and enough intelligence to be trained on a simple routine task. Lot of other industries require a dedicated stream of study or skill set that is over and above ‘ability to communicate in English’. That is the reason getting a bpo job is very easy.
2.Starting salary in bpo job is at par with other industries. Invariably people who do not have any specialized knowledge or are plain university graduate find bpo’s lucrative as entry is easy and starting salary look great. There are pros and cons of their decision. A plain graduate with no advance or professional training has a limited capacity to earn and once a person joins BPO job any avenues of regular study are gone. Any person who has no means or caliber to study further and who can do night shits and a monotonous repetitive factor kind of work whole life should stick to BPO’s.
3. Growth prospects are limited.It won’t bother to discuss the time one needs to move up the ladder in operations. You may become a team leader or a manager but you will stay in opertions and work during night time. Even a decade of work experience will not enable you to transfer your skills to any other industry or feild. What will you be champion at? Of course the process you have spend your maximum time at be it sales, customer service, medical transcription, collection, health care etc. Even with years of this experience you are only fit to manage or lead such a process in bpo companies.
4. Who takes up positions at other much more paying, daytime and lucrative fields in bpo industries? Means who is a financial manager, Human resource manager, sales manager, technology, transitions manager, business process improvement and engineering guys,well they all will be people who did not join a bpo job after their graduation or post graduation. They are people who have education and training in their respective fields. MBA’s, CA’s, IT professionals, Sales experts etc. You can not take a graduate with ten years experience in bpo operations and make them work in these specialized positions. Well their nature and work and salaries are far far better that operations people.
4. All I want to tell to potential candidates is that at the end of the day bpo operations is a low skill, monotonous, low paid job. If you can not study further, you can work like a factory worker on phones and computers during nights and do this when you are in your thirties or forties then go ahead get in bpo. Else complete your studies be experts at something and then join wherever you get an opportunity including bpo’s.
6. Night shift operations, particularly for people who are operations people like team leaders, managers etc. will stay whole life, its not that easy when one is in mid thirties or more.
7. If you have spend some time in bpo’s operations and you want to change your career, you will find that neither you have any specialized education nor bpo operations impart you any great skill. You won’t have much to offer to other industries and will have to swap you job to the level of the fresh graduates or little more experienced graduates at a low salary.These issues are real. One should be aware of all this before making a decision to join bpo’s. I hope you will not delete this post for the benefit of people who might not consider the repercussions of their decision to go for a early job just out of their college at the expense of a better rewarding career,