No more honeymoons.

The BPO industry needs to reassess their ookt, awkt, owkts.
Ouch…….
Hitherto the industry has managed to cater to its needs by picking somewhat easily available smatterings, instead of developing a more suited high-end training design, but fell short every time. Successors know only what the daddy taught them, but the industry need some smart prodigies who can outshine daddies. The focus is on training the trainers on what they themselves got to know from their progenitors. They pick some one from the production floor, and simply train on somehow borrowed modules. No value addition, and a very little practical implication. The value addition, high-end knowledge based techniques, custom made training designs, which are more suited to the industry needs are so distant, as the industry is seen struggling to find reliable shoulders to share the burden with.
Instead of developing a new solution, which is in jibe with the present needs, the Training department of most of the BPO’s has developed expertise in different stupendous ways to kill time.
Successors imbibe the inheritance with a misbegotten faith in the accuracy and applicability of the inherited knowledge, which has no practical implications. As people come and go, and most of the times restrict themselves in boundaries defined by influences. Limit themselves to ooze admiration only, and most of the times they defer to old philosophies, & seriously do not focus on something they thought they would, to bring change. They simply flow with it. The present state of affairs predisposes us to be submissive and not to think beyond. Somehow, had made us believe what we would have never otherwise.
We easily fall for it, which somehow seems to be politically correct, and we simply see it as a step to get where we strongly want to be, which is surely not what our present job demands. I wanted to share a recent observation; it’s more of an eye opener. But that would make this “no more honeymoons” too long to be read in one fell swoop. I’ll share it next weak.
And if we dwell on the same old technique which seemed promising then, we are highly delusioned, as it will never going to work that way. We got to find break through techniques, got to find the best suited solutions, as things are changing rapidly.
I changed a lot many companies put all the ages together, and I believe innovations do not come with a group working together. As most of the times, groups only hang around, and kill time and resources. Adding very less than what they initially agreed on while joining the group. The idea is to encourage the innovative community as opposed to the innovative pyramid. The participation, not the hierarchy. Making it easy for quite genius innovators to surface ideas. Taking innovative ideas to custom-made applications.
Try to beat the big No (hierarchy), which somehow implicit that if you don’t belong to a certain level of the pyramid you can’t surface the ideas. This is what eventually stops you from envision, from being innovative, and to build state of art business models.
Same role should not excite you for long, and if does, there got to be something seriously wrong with either you or the job.
The final output of training is somewhere close to zero; and we are left we the big question: Was the training of any help?
The answer is: big big no. And these days they say: “You can never change the character of a Scorpio”, “They’ll speak the way they’ve been speaking”, neutral accent is good. Seems true at times. But doesn’t that suggest we’ve been spending money just like that? Seven eight years in the business and we never thought of something that could work. Too bad.
The average expenditure on training a batch of 25 new recruits is minimum twenty five thousand across industry, and this does not include any facility other than training that an employee would enjoy (pick-drops, meals, etc.)
It’s a trend across the industry that a certain %age would somehow fail to clear training program and is asked to leave. This trend is not quite apparent in sizable originations, may be because they can somehow employ that %age elsewhere because of their business diversification. But the fact is that %age is not employed to do the work they were initially hired for. The idea is that every player in the industry gives up.
We’ve got two options: learn the ropes like the way every one does and feel good about it, or try to get to see follies to find something that would click. Either do regular business or redefine business.
Money waste is still o.k., as we had the pretext of being new in the industry. But for how long! And did we learn anything from it? Or we are accepting it as a reality of life. It’ll be like the way it is, or may change with its own snail pace. Give me a break.
All this is so hard-wired in our brains, which stop us from what we should be doing instead. We got to act, if not before time, at least when the time itself is crying for a change.
The fact is we need to reassess the training modules and the pyramid.
The growth of the industry is contingent on how well we transition with credible domain expertise. And the big shots say that we don’t have training support which can help the growing needs of BPO, training institutes are no better than the industry’s in-house training program, the out-source outsource to facilitators for that purpose only.
We need to widen the horizon of knowledge delivery, need to get it in line with high-end quality needs.
A noticeable %age of the handpicked resource fails to meet expectations to clear training every time. And out of those who somehow clear, fail to put to use whatever they are expected to after the so called training.
If we need something strongly enough we should do something about it, not just wait for things to change. The language training institute know not more than the core industry, have only economies of space and resource. The resources, which somehow most of the times at a later stage in their career, end up with BPO. The shift again is of no help to the business. It has been proven with time that the backing module is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Across the industry, the training didn’t help much as did the self-learning and an inclination to learn. Most of staff still speaks the way they were used to, irrespective of the umpteen numbers of training sessions they’ve been through. 70-80 modifications is too less. As the policy to cherry-pick didn’t help, we’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
We’ve got to dump the Dumb charades, Pink pajamas, How is yours, Chinese whispers, et. al. All these suggest me of a perfect way to kill time, as you don’t have much to share (knowledge). The Jones is also falling short of being a real help, then why not play game. We got to learn to respond to immediate exigencies, and not start to vote for Pink pajamas, Fussy ducks.
The reason why I m so peculiar about the strengthening of the knowledge of training is, that I’ve been in the industry for long, and know of major players and their strategies and escapes. The education system will take its own time to realize the need for industry based training or something that has some practical applications. Since we never had a system to monitor sounds, and we simply borrowed a system having little practical use in a total different state of affairs, may be because of economies of ease and pain in developing something new. How easily we give up to our own creations is what that amaze me. As we simply ponce around being correct spelling-wise as opposed to being sound-wise. To change the system to sound centric from spelling-centric need some initiates. Hither to we’ve followed a weak model which has regulated sounds, instead of just the opposite, what we should have. To quote an example: I recently joined a firm and I find people struggling hard to digest the new spelling of my name. And I see 4-5 immediate alternate spellings. One for every department: Facility, finance, production, training. I’ll be the happiest person on the face of the earth, the day I see all men realize the importance of sound, speech, words in its true sense. Which is not possible if we don’t tell everybody of the easy way to relate to what they dread of, the sound.
It is very evident that we always needed a paradigm in one form or the other, to refer to. Something that could standardize the usage, worldwide. Picking spellings as a paradigm to determine sounds was an easy escape. Sounds should be universal and if something has to vary, let it be the rhythm only (refer to page_______)
Our unprecedented love for spellings killed our sounds. The most popular theory in linguistics suggest that peripheral organs are responsible for the way we speak. Not quite true (refer to page no.___ for the insight). Most of the countries which did not speak English initially simply borrowed the model which the native speakers used. The borrowed supportive model which didn’t have anything to support the sounds seems to regulate sounds, which is not at all good for words. The main focus had been on the correctness of the spellings, to remember them as they had always been. The main focus of the Educational system in most of the south-east Asian countries had always had been on educating people of the benefit of being Spelling-wise as opposed to being Sound-wise.
As the students have always escaped out of the torture of learning sounds as they only had to write to pass examinations. But they always had difficulties with pronunciations in the real world.
It has been observed in south-east countries that the people know the spellings of a lot many words than the sounds (which are not right most of the times), which is inversely so in a country with native English speaking population.
I have heard a lot many libertarians from south-east Asian countries, especially India crying that it really does not matter if you pronounce a word differently than a native speaker, “if it’s a proper noun, you can say which ever way you like”. Oh my god, please kill me: if they are so liberals, then why do they worship the text (spellings), and why do they mispronounce their native language words? Why did they anglicize their native language words? (Refer to page______). The proclivity to put script ahead of speech is damaging to languages world-wide.