MANILA — About 135,000 jobs were added to the Information Technology and Business Process Management (IT-BPM) industry in 2023, a group reported on Wednesday.

This brings the total number of the workforce in the sector to 1.7 million employees, the IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) said.

IBPAP President and CEO Jack Madrid attributed the surge of employment to the increasing demand for offshoring work.

"We seem to be the first choice in delivering customer experience [due to] our reputation for being able to deliver complex business services, diverse functions across vertical industries," Madrid said during the IT-BPM Summit in Parañaque City.

"Our industry has grown from plain vanilla contact center services, to very distinct verticals like banking, financial services, insurance, healthcare management, even creatives,” Madrid said.

The industry is working on its goal to provide an additional 1.1 million jobs and increase its revenue by $29.5 billion in 2028.

With a strong performance for 2023, IBPAP remains confident that its targets for the industry roadmap is attainable.

But Madrid said that talent gap and skills mismatch remained a challenge for the sector.

Upskilling and reskilling of the current and incoming workforce should be prioritized, he said.

Aside from undergoing upskilling every 6 months, Madrid added that the current education curriculum needs to be updated to fit the demands of the industry.

“There is no demand problem. What we have is a supply issue,” Madrid said.

“The government needs to support this. We need to address the lack of faculty from elementary to high school to university. Technology is changing the nature of work, changing the expectations,” he said.

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As the economy bounces back from the COVID-19 pandemic, IBPAP emphasized the importance of striking a balance on work setup and preferences.

While the workforce may prefer remote work as their jobs can be done remotely, some clients might prefer onsite work.

“In our experience, IT work and our workforce tend to strongly prefer working remotely… On the contact center side, because of the customer who want their data to be done in a safer environment, there is a stronger preference for onsite operations,” Madrid said.

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