MANILA, Philippines — The business process outsourcing sector expects to hit its accelerated growth target of 25 percent or $25 billion export revenues by 2016 instead of a best case scenario of 15 percent growth or $20 billion five years from now.

Alfredo Ayala, chairman of the BPAP (BPO Association of the Philippines), said in a speech at the International Outsourcing Summit that if government and the private sector jointly implement enhancement measures the accelerated case scenario is likely to be achieved.

“The real key is our partnership between government and private sector. If we can pull that off then we can hit the accelerated case,” Ayala said.

The BPAP 2016 masterplan has set two growth scenarios: The best case and accelerated case.

The best case calls for a 15 percent growth rate or $20 billion export revenues by 2016 from the projected $11 billion in 2011, direct employment of 900,000 from the current 600,000 and combined direct and indirect employment of 3 million.

Under the accelerated case, the target is 25 percent growth for $25 billion export revenues by 2016. Direct jobs would be 1.2 million and indirect and direct jobs of 4.5 million.

Ayala, however, said that the main challenge now is the supply of talent. He said the industry had accomplished the goals in the 2011 BPAP masterplan of generating demand for the Philippine BPO industry.

“Demand generation has become less of an issue now because the world has come to us so our focus now is on the supply side of talent,” Ayala said.

“The challenge is how can we make use of this strong demand,” said Ayala.

Trade and Industry Secretary Gregory L. Domingo said the talent supply has been an issue since 2003 when the industry was only 25,000 people.

“But we are able to cope until now when the scale of the industry has gone up to 600,000. So the problem has become acute because we only have 400,000 graduates a year,” he said.

He said that industry is targeting to employ between 80,000 to 100,000 new hires this year but said that even the 80,000 is already a stretch given the acute supply situation.

He, however, said that the government and the academe is addressing this head-on including the Department of Education, Commission on Higher Education, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority and the private sector.

Domingo even said that the Department of Science and Technology is going to make available free software, a training module for would be BPO applicants.

“The classroom solution is no longer sufficient so we are offering online training with free software and the DoST is working on it,” he said.

Congress has also enacted milestone legislation Republic Act 10151 on the employment in the BPO sector including the employment of night workers, especially women. Congress also passed the Data Protection and Privacy Law.

Other government intervention is the continued provision of incentives to those expanding BPO operations.