Calls centres in Britain, France, Spain, the United States and many other nations have been relocated to other countries that possess suitable language skills and offer cheaper labour costs, eg India, Algeria, South America and the Philippines.
At national levels agencies are competing to attract inward investment and incentives include taxation-free periods, grants and subsidies, and support at organizational levels. Non-governmental organizations have also been successful in positively communicating the skills and financial benefits of offshoring, eg Nasscom in India.
Promotional material from Trade New Zealand highlights an advanced telecommunications infrastructure; support from the local government; well developed language skills; and a well educated and low-cost workforce. A Call Centre A raction Initiative encourages the development of an infrastructure of call centre consultants and training providers to deliver advice and support. In addition, Work and Income New Zealand also provides support for relocating companies through the supply of training course.
In England, support for inward investment is also provided at regional levels as a means of boosting local economies. Regional Development Agencies such as North West RDA funded the development of CallNorthWest and Yorkshire Forward funded The Yorkshire and Humberside Call Centre Network to provide the supportive infrastructure for the industry.
One means by which regeneration agencies provide support is through education and training initiatives, which are considered to be a very important strategy in providing potential employees. This is because some incoming employers believe certain groups do not possess the necessary skills. To address this agencies have funded pre-employment training courses thus creating an employee supply line.
These pre-employment programmes can be relatively expensive and given the high rates of employee turnover it is important to select suitable candidates. To add to these challenges, one employer was still reluctant to recruit programme participants because it believed the trainees might not have the required levels of skills. Therefore, it is important that development agencies carefully direct their funding. ‘We need to make sure that the money we spend on training these people isn’t wasted’.
The objective of regeneration agencies is to improve the economy and get people into employment. Pre-employment training is one means of achieving this but it would sometimes appear to be of a variable standard. Belt and Richardson noted a mismatch between training providers and call centre employers regarding skills requirements. They recommend that training providers avoid playing the ‘numbers game’ of ge ing people into employment and instead focus on long-term employment sustainability.
The links between trainers involved with pre-employment training and employers would sometimes appear to be inadequate. One piece of research noted:
[There is a] general lack of engagement between trainers and employers. In fact, in one of the case study training programmes, none of the trainers had even set foot inside a call centre. Meaningful and ongoing dialogue between trainers and employers on skills issues was infrequent or nonexistent in all but one of the case studies. Unsurprisingly, this situation seriously restricted the ability of the initiatives to meet employers’ skill needs.
Although most regions and countries consider the introduction of new jobs positively there are some critics. Call centres have been described by Belt as being mainly ‘careerless’. She referred to the TUC and stated that employers were ‘accused of providing large numbers of part-time, low-skilled, highly repetitive, pressurized and dead-end jobs’. She also concluded that because call centre jobs tended to be located in old industrial areas there was a developing production of geographic inequality.
To achieve the best outcomes inward investment agencies and call centres need to work cooperatively together and develop their relationship. For example, in a list of ‘top tips’ employment agency Adecco recommended that contact centres, ‘Assess initiatives, such as pre-employment training as a way of demonstrating commitment to the local area and building links with potential employees of the future.’
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