TACLOBAN CITY – The expansion of the call center locator at the Leyte ICT Park in Palo, Leyte is expected to generate some 600 additional jobs for Leyteños.

Leyte Gov. Carlos Jericho “Icot” L. Petilla calculated this during the meeting of the Provincial Development Council (PDC) recently held at the Governor’s Hall here. The meeting was attended by local chief executives and municipal planners.

“The business process outsourcing (BPO) and information communication technology (ICT) business in the country would still be brisk despite the global economic slowdown,” the governor said.

Petilla was referring to the APAC Customer Services Inc., the call center located in the province-owned Leyte ICT Park, which recently asked the provincial management for an additional 2,500 square meters of office space for its expansion plan.

APAC presently occupies the former Leyte Academic Center (LAC) Gymnasium, a 3,000-square meter covered area that was transformed into a high-end call center facility when the center started operations in Leyte early this year.

With the 2,500-square meter additional office space that the APAC is asking, it is preparing to house at least 600 more call center agents, the governor said.

The APAC officials have earlier forewarned that their Leyte site would only be the start of the company’s five-year expansion in the country, where 80 percent of its growth will be located in the provinces.

Petilla said the province officials immediately have to go straight to the drawing board to act on this request – to ensure that the job opportunities created by this expansion would benefit the jobseekers of Leyte and Eastern Visayas provinces.

“We need to capitalize on the bigger growth of the ICT industry in the province,” said Petilla.

Leyte has become an alternative hub for provincial expansion of BPO and ICT players because of its existing fiber optic connections, a good education system with 5,000 to 8,000 graduates every year, and incentives from the local government, it was learned.