BPO workers cannot speak English

New Delhi: India may be the BPO hot spot but surprisingly 90 per cent of graduates seeking call centre jobs just don't speak English the way that it needs to be spoken.

According to a survey of 17 cities, only 10 per cent of graduates applying for BPO jobs have the correct accent, voice clarity and grammar.

Such shortage will only worsen as Indian undergraduates lag in key requirements of the industry.

About 10,000 graduates across 17 cities were put to test by Bangalore based skills assessment company MeritTrac. Voice clarity, accent nutrality, fluency of speech and grammar were what they were tested on.

While 90 per cent of the graduates tested had acceptable voice clarity, only 15 per cent meet industry expectations in grammar.

Also only 15 per cent surveyd have a neutral accent a key parameter for BPO jobs.

The survey also points that the eastern part of the country performs above industry average on all these parameters.

But do these numbers really count considering the fact that fewer BPO's today offer voice services.

"Even for KPO's this survey counts. While importance of certain parameters may differ you still not to have good communication skills to succeed in the BPO space," Madan Padaki, co-founder and director of MeritTrac Services, says.

But these numbers don't really come as a surprise. Conversion rates in the BPO space are as low as 5 per cent.

It means that for every 100 canditates interviewed only 5 make the cut. Not surprisingly then a NASSCOM-MCKINSEY study expects a shortfall of 500,000 people by the year 2010.

"The problem is acute. Firstly there is a shortage of people and secondly the ones available are not good enough," Kiran Karnik, President- NASSCOM says.

And it is this shortage that is leading BPO's to not just look at tier-2 and tier-3 cities for talent but also scout for talent at the undergraduate level.

Even big BPO's like Genpact today recruit students who have just passed out of school.