Is there a career path in the BPO industry?
Popular belief is that there are numerous job opportunities but fewer career opportunities in the BPO sector, but I feel that the Indian BPO industry currently has boundless career opportunities. This is evident from the fact that over the years the scope of services has grown from providing just voice-based marketing and customer relationship management services to transaction processing in finance and accounting, human resources, learning and procurement, legal transcription, animation and multimedia, content creation, as well as industry-specific services focusing on the insurance, healthcare, pharmaceutical and utility industries.
For example, companies in the life science industry are quite familiar to outsourcing; they outsource some of their critical processes like drug discovery, clinical trials, product manufacture, and data management. Thus the mainstream outsourcing service providers require specialist knowledge and skill sets to perform traditional life science functions such as clinical data management and pharmacovigilance (the monitoring of drug safety). India is a popular offshore location for outsourcing these sensitive functions, due largely to cost benefits and the availability of an appropriately skilled talent pool.