Why Wipro might be a great place to work in

Wipro just opened in Cebu. A couple of months old I think. I pass by their office because it's across one of the biggest commercial centers in the city. It's just across Ayala center Cebu. At first I thought, no big deal. Just another BPO - that's business process outsourcing place for those that aren't familiar.

Anyway I didn't intentionally read about them, but as I was browsing on FastCompany.com, I chanced on this article that actually praises the Wipro business and recruitment model.

Apparently, Wipro has set up such a huge campus in Bangalore India that it looks like Harvard. It's a great place to learn. What Wipro has done is taken the needs of their company and decided to teach it to the populace. Instead of waiting for schools to spit out the right candidates for jobs after they graduate, they thought - what the heck, let's teach them.

And so Wipro now has a library, classrooms, lab, and lecture-hall trappings of a university. They teach everything from Japanese to advanced engineering that may just be as good as any school in the West. They have mandatory development classes for newbies as well as voluntary graduate-level coursework, which means everyone from staff members to managers get to take advantage of a wonderful learning atmosphere while they work.

I guess for Wipro that would be a necessity considering they have 80,000 employees and growing! It's just amazing! I defintely admire what they've done with growth for their employees. I would definitely stay in a company that offer me that much learning and growth. Not only am I paid to do my job, but I'm paid to improve myself. Too bad I didn't find an opening for the Cebu office on their website. I would love to be part of a culture like that.

Why are young Filipinos going abroad to find work?

Young Filipinos go abroad to find jobs because many think there's more money to make out there. Aside from that you also get the following perks:

• Adventure - you get to live somewhere else FAR away from parents and relatives who just love to tell you what to do with you life. It's the ultimate adventure
  
• Independence - along with the feeling of getting away from it all, there's also the reverberating exuberance of making and spending your own hard-earned money. And it's not just any money - it's foreign currency!
• Compensation - of course the last bet, everybody else is paid higher. Let's make an example of Call center agents since there are so many of them floating around these days.

  • Call center agents get a starting salary of P15,000, but many are being recruited in Singapore to receive at least three times their salaries here.
  • A separate study by IT publication ZDNet Asia says the average annual salary of senior IT professionals in the Philippines is $12,425 year. That is the equivalent of P521,850 at the exchange rate of 42 pesos to the dollar, but it’s still lower than $44,858 in Singapore, $57,303 in Hong Kong, and $76,851 in Australia.
  • Even coffee shop workers earn as much as $2,500 Singaporean out there, which beats a decent hard-working IT professional in the Philippines these days. That's tough, specially with prices rising as they are

Of course, the problem isn't the same for us simple folk who already have families and responsibilities here. It's more difficult to move abroad - for me specifically. I respect those who choose to go elsewhere for opportunity, but mine is here... with my daughter. I just hope I don't end up leaving her for money soon too.

Career Interests Game

Everybody wonders what career fits their personality. This is most obvious for kids who are graduating from college. The immediate question then becomes what will I do after I graduate? In the Philippines a lot of kids end up unemployed. I guess this is now true for most parts of the world.

Many say it's not easy to get a job, and I agree that's true. But I also have a stand that it's really not that difficult either. It only becomes a burden when people are picky.

There are a lot of call center and BPO companies springing up in Cebu City, the options are almost limitless. The local newspaper has half their pages devoted to classified ads on weekends.

I tell you the less picky you are, the easier it is really to get a job.

Below is the career interests game by Dr. John L. Holland, the premise here is that there are 6 groups of individuals all of which have a specific quality that stands out. You may have a characteristic in common with some or all of them but if you were to join a group of radicals separated according to the characteristics below, who would you prefer first?

So the general idea is that after you choose, the choice will give you additional ways of checking out your career-related interests and getting involved in your career planning.

Realistic	Investigative	Artistic	Social	Enterprising	Conventional
People who have athletic or mechanical ability, prefer to work with objects, machines, tools, plants or animals, or to be outdoors.	People who like to observe,learn, investigate, analyze, evaluate or solve problems.	People who have artistic, innovating or intuitional abilities and like to work in unstructured situations using their imagination and creativity.	People who like to work with people to enlighten, inform, help, train, or cure them, or are skilled with words.	People who like to work with people, influencing, persuading, performing, leading or managing for organizational goals or economic gain.	People who like to work with data, have clerical or numerical ability, carry out tasks in detail or follow through on others' instructions.

This RIASEC model of occupations is the copyrighted work of Dr. John L. Holland, and his publisher, Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. (PAR). For an assessment of your career interests, contact the MU Career Center to complete a Self-Directed Search, or take it online.

Source: http://career.missouri.edu/students/explore/thecareerinterestsgame.php

Brain Drain In The Philippines

I read in a local newspaper article that many companies think the Philippines is going through some pretty major "brain drain."

And why not? Prices are high, salaries are the same. People can't be expected to stay for that. I should know I got an offer from Dubai that was pretty good. For a staff position, the salary I was offered almost matched the rate I'm getting now as management.

Now if a staff member there earns almost the same as a manager here, you'd probably notice what a big discrepancy that would be for the same position. Of course I'm not familiar with their cost of living there - it can't be much better than here I guess with the global economy acting up as it is.

There have been more than 50,000 healthcare workers (nurses, doctors and therapists) who have left the country and I don't disagree with them leaving but those of us left here are rather at a loss now aren't we?

Anyway that's not all, more and more workers are opting to take refuge abroad than be stuck here in the Philippines. I for one, would rather stay. I really like it here but sometimes it just can't be helped when you think about the opportunities out there...

We need better paying jobs. Salaries that can actually pay for rising expenses. Allowances that are non-taxable. For Filipino workers to actually stay in the Philippines, there has to be the same opportunity here than there is abroad. That is how to stop the brain drain