The fight for talent will only get more aggressive in the approaching year. There will be an increasing demand for people with domain knowledge and those with technical know-how. The focus of companies will be to bring people in the tier 2, 3 and 4 cities to the same learning curve as the existing pool is not ready to service the demand. Therefore, companies will focus on increasing their catchment areas by tying up with academic institutes to develop the supply chain

As business moves into the next generation BPO, the challenge will be to create an environment where people from across cultures, geographies and domains can work together on a virtual platform. The Talent Management challenge here would be to create a mechanism to onboard the team into one culture while keeping the nuances of diversity. Managers will have to be more sensitive to a diverse pool while focusing on outcome and the entire organization as a whole would be required to integrate a global delivery model.

The average age in the BPO sector is lesser, which brings in a different mindset and socio-cultural background, which is significantly different than it was 4-5 years ago. The aim will be to enable an environment to leverage on the core strengths of employees first and customer second. More decisions will need to happen at the grassroots levels and increasing emphasis should be laid on creating values for employees and customers, and transferring that into business benefits.