Tag: Expat in the Philippines

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 12 – April 2013 – The Wheels Come Off

Picture1Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

April 2012, was a tough month. The challenge with filling training classes continued. We had three staff members depart for other opportunities. I ended a six-month engagement with my top client. It was time to switch gears again. We needed to pivot towards doing more outsourcing and consulting and less training.

One good things to come out of April, was the Social Media Analytics Workshop we held for a group of trainees for one of our clients. We discovered some pretty good talent and were able to put together a good team of analysts with a large range of analytics skills and social media savvy. There are a plethora of social media analytics tools built-in to just about every significant social media site. We also learned that the Philippines is the most social media driven country in the world. There is a higher percentage of Filipinos are online and actively using social media that with any other country.

I also continued to blog almost daily as I had learned from a good friend, is the key to monetizing your online business. You need fresh content that is relevant and engaging. You have that and you feed it to your audience on a regular basis, you can then start making a profit off it. Blogging about analytics is a key tool for analysts that’s often overlooked. Most analysts stay embedded in their silo. They focus on the data at hand and they master how to identify, inventory and integrate it. They accumulate a wealth of experience and knowledge and many are blogging about it.

However, in this case it was too little too late. Due to a series of personal and professional challenges it was time to think about what to do if revenue didn’t pick up quickly.

Analytics Tool > Analytics Blog > http://www.wordpress.com

Analytics Concept > Social Media Analytics > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_analytics

YouTube Video > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQYOmQRhzhM&feature=share&list=PL8D46F50D27222FD4

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business.

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 11 – March 2013 – Missed Opportunities

420Pasig City, Metro Manila, Philippines

March was lined up to be a very big month. We had 4 different training on the calendar as we continued to diversify our offering to get access to different types of clients and trainees. I continued to do media events and speaking engagements to push the brand. On paper the month should have led us to a very prosperous outcome and we would be well on our way to a healthy business model.

However, I underestimated a couple of things and overestimated our capabilities. This is exactly where so many small business efforts fail. Trying to do too much to soon. We did four different types of training; recruitment analytics, English for call center jobs, sales and marketing analytics and analytics for business leaders. If everything would have filled up I would have made over 100,000 PHP. But in the end I lost money on all four after costs of staff and venue were factored in. It’s the last time I did trainings without the help of a dedicated marketing partner.

I also overestimated my staff. One of my biggest weaknesses as a leader is that I tend to over trust and over challenge. I tend to treat employees as I wanted to be treated myself, but I forget they do not have the same level of experience and depth of passion I have. It sets them up for failure. And we failed miserably in our marketing, our recruiting, the quality of our product and our execution of strategy. I just got too excited and lost my discipline.

I also continued to do media events, but wasn’t capitalizing on them. Promoting myself is not easy. I can talk all day, but I forget the little things. Trinkets for the host, Shout outs to key business partners, mixing in a little Tagalog, staying on script. All valuable things that I can see now in hindsight I should have done better.

I really had uncovered a niche for training that I want to focus more on in the future. Recruitment Analytics training is something I am good at and something there is a dire need for in the Philippines.

Analytics Tool > Bullhorn > http://www.bullhorn.com

Analytics Concept > Recruitment Analytics > http://www.recruiter.com/recruitment-metrics.html

YouTube Resource > http://youtu.be/blx8IuHsmCA

Analytics in the Philippines – The Philippines is at the center of the action when it comes to solutions to the global need for analytics. Blessed with a solid foundation of young, educated and English speaking workforce, companies around the world are look for Filipino analytics talent to fill analytics positions. DMAIPH was set up to facilitate these solutions and bring the talent and the business together. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can help you take advantage of this unique global opportunity.

13 Month in the Philippines – Lesson 5 – September 2012 – Cracks in the Pavement

IMG_0994 Clark, Pampanga, Philippines

In September we stated working for a client that at first seemed to be a wonderful opportunity. They asked us to help them set up a manpower staffing business in Clark, Pampanga. It was a very interesting proposition. We would go out and sell the business and get a 50% commission on any business we brought in the door. We were given an office space, internet access, business cards, a business proposal and we found a list of potential clients to market too. We started doing a multi channel sales campaign with an e-mail blitz, phone call and in-person meetings. We also did some deep dive competitor research including mystery shopping. And we networked with the government agency in charge of the Clark Freeport Trade Zone. But we made a lot of assumptions and mistakes and after about three weeks of travelling from Makati to Clark (about 2 hours each way), things hadn’t worked out the way we had hoped for. Let’s look at a couple of the issues and analyze them.

1. We decided to set up shop in an area we were not at all familiar with. To mitigate this we hired a local with manpower experience.
2. We had to spend a lot of time travelling, so we had a small window for meetings. So we made sure all appointments where confirmed the day before.
3. We wanted to get to know the way things worked. So I networked with several key people via LinkedIn and in person appointments.
4. We didn’t have any upfront revenue. We got our client to pay most of the upfront costs for marketing and promotions.
5. We need to get our name out there. We sponsored a job fair and I got a speaking engagement at the event.
6. We had to assess the market opportunity. I had a couple of trainees build a prospective client database and map out locations.

So all things looked good. We had a great opportunity, I had applied a lot of analysis and we were ready to go.

But there were crack in the foundation and they had nothing to do with my analysis or our strategy. They had to do with people.

Even the best laid plans don’t work our if you cant count on the people to execute the plans. Partners got distracted, staff had to deal with personal challenges and personal life started to suffer from professional stresses. By the end of September there were more cracks in the pavement then I had cement to fill them with.

But it was still so much fun, so much adventure, so much excitement I just rolled with the blows and kept pushing forward!

Analytics Tool > Tableau Public > http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

Analytics Concept > Competitor Landscape > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_intelligence

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj1q4zunuN0&feature=share&list=PL8D46F50D27222FD4

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business. 

13 Months in the Philippines- Lesson 4 – August 2012 – Mother Nature Strikes

IMG_1011Manila, Metro Manila, Philippines

In late July, 2012, the Philippines was pounded by several typhoons and monsoon rains. There was one period where it rained hard for four days straight non-stop. Before the storms, I was in full swing… setting up speaking engagements, attending job fairs, conducting trainings, and shopping for clients, but then the storms came and everything ground to a halt. At the time, after three months of non-stop working, it seemed like a nice respite.

For those of you who have never been in Manila during a flood, its pretty hard to describe with out it sounding dramatic. In short, the city floods almost every year for a number of reasons. The people are just used to it. Walking in water up to your waste and dealing with school and business closures… its now big thing to most residents of Manila. But for me it was a pretty overwhelming experience. After coming back from a field trip on the 3rd day of the heavy rains, my son was stranded at his school. And I was powerless to do much. We walked a couple of miles from Makati to Manila in heavy downpours to get to his school. There were no taxis or public transit, so we had quite an adventure getting back from Manila to Makati.

Anyway, because of the floods, I did have to cancel once training class. It was a full class of 15 and had a lot of people with call center experience. It would have been a very fun class.

After the floods, things changed pretty significantly and pretty rapidly. More on that in the next blog post. But August was kind of a lost month. I didn’t conduct any other trainings that month due to scheduling issues and for the first time I started to wonder if my plans were going to work.

As an analyst, this is where I had to do a better job looking at and listening to the data. We weren’t making a lot of money on the public trainings and we had only placed 3 of our initial 30+ trainees directly. The business model was not working as it was intended to. Our ROI was not good for job fairs, we were not getting clients to sign up with us directly and I hadn’t quite figured out the marketing yet. So based on all the info, a change in course had to be made. So by the end of August BPO Elite moved in an entirely new direction.

Analytics Tool > SuveryMonkey > http://www.surveymonkey.com

Analytics Concept > Customer Insights > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_insight

YouTube Video > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS_IkObdTc0&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business. 

13 Months in the Philippines – Lesson 2 – June 2012 – Training is My Passion

522Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines

I did a trial run of the Introduction to Analytics training back in December 2011 with some interns and business partners, which helped me prepare a two-day training class. I launched the two-day class with the target of fresh grads in late May 2012, and I conducted several of the classes over the course of the next six months. It was in June however that I really figured out that I was an amazing trainer and that I could enchant an audience by talking about analytics.

I have always liked being in front of an audience and being empowered to talk about things I am passionate about it. I get a huge rush of adrenaline that can last for several hours. This calling originally led me to traditional classroom teaching but after several misadventures post graduate school, I took the job with Wells Fargo to pay the bills. Fifteen years later I left Wells to do training full time. In the interim I did a lot of ad-hoc and informal training in various way at Wells although I never had trainer in the title.

Per Wikipedia, a Trainer is a person who educates employees of companies on specific topics of workplace importance. While a teacher is simply who provide schooling for pupils and students. I have found that I am exactly in the middle. And there are very, very few people who can train like a teacher. People who can provide hands on, useful content in a short time frame, but deliver it in way that has the empowering effect of taking an actual academic style class are worth their weight in gold. These are the great trainers or favorite instructors who end up becoming speaker and lectures. They have both the ability to train on skill and teach on knowledge. This is what I learned about myself last June.

From an analytics standpoint, I learned a lot about how to construct a training program. Budget, Recruitment, Venue Management, Staffing, Marketing, etc. I learned a lifetime worth of lessons in a few months. I was able to look at each of these topics and find data to compare what I was doing to other benchmarks. Am I efficient, am I cost-effective, am I marketable. Lots and lots of data to bring into my analysis of how to grow my business.

Analytics Tool > Microsoft Excel > http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/

Analytics Concept > Big Data > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

YouTube Resource > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjuyH4RTrM&feature=share&list=PL7EC252B253873D5D

My Analytics Story – My passion is solving problems by bringing together the best talent, cutting edge technology and tried and true methodologies. DMAIPH is all about empowering people towards better Decision-Making through the use Analytics and business Intelligence. This is what I do best. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly for a free consultation about getting more analytics into your career and your business.

The Current Analytics Talent Landscape in the Philippines – Updated

Updated on 10/26/16

Something I was working on for a potential client, that I thought interesting enough to share.

Here are some of the common characteristics of the three types of analytics talent you will find in the Philippines. Keep in mind that analytics is still a fairly very new concept in the Philippines, but I am convinced its primed for continued growth.

From my experience the analytics talent in the Philippines can be broken into three groups.

  1. Fresh Grads
  2. Entry Level Analysts
  3. Experienced Analysts

For the sake of comparison, I will speak mainly of analytics generalist positions like business analysts and operations analysts. More niche analytics jobs like financial analysts or quality analysts often come from different backgrounds then the bulk of the analytics talent I have worked with.

The first group of analysts are fresh grads. By and large they come from programs like IT, ComSci, Marketing, Business and other related courses. The ones with technical degrees all have some coding skills, know a few programming languages, are very comfortable with Excel and Access and have a general theoretical knowledge of databases, data warehouses and how big data is collected, stored and managed. Generally the business and marketing grads, have less technical skill, but are better prepared for the communication and data sharing side of analytics.

There are several thousand of these graduates entering the workforce every year, but a small % of them are really prepared for analyst careers. Several schools have launched Business Analytics elective tracts, but they are just getting started.

Most fresh grads with analytics talent find jobs in retail or in call centers, many as tech support or IT staff. The ones that do end up with the word analyst in the title are actually more like data encoders or just run reports.  They do very little actual analysis.

From this pool, the English and communications requirements of many analyst jobs screen out 75% of the applicants. Fresh grads who start in analyst roles make salaries of between 10-20,000 PHP a month.

The second group of analysts comes the way most people have become analysts… accidentally. They have very similar educational experiences to the fresh grad batch, but started as a CSR or IT or Tech Support and rose above their peers to take on more complex duties.

These analysts find ways to add value to their reports, or have a propensity to solve hard problems or have a tech skill that really stands out. They are promoted to entry level analyst jobs where they are generally used with business lines to do metrics and KPI reporting, assist with process improvement initiatives.

They start to become very skilled, but generally in only 1-2 applications. Their talent is very concentrated and they are not generally pushed to do more. Whether it be working with certain BI or analytics tools, CRMs or other applications, they become very proficient end users but rarely learn the concepts that allow them to move easily between companies. They generally make salaries of about 20-30,000 PHP a month.

However, that doesn’t stop them from hopping around quite a bit. The severe talent shortage for analysts in Metro Manila see a lot of analysts with 1-2 years under their belt get pirated and over a 5-6 year period you see they working for 3-4 companies, each time chasing more money. And rarely does this make them a better analysts as they have a lot of knowledge about a few things, but have not really mastered a competency in anything.

IMG_1310

The only training they receive is in-house training on new systems that is generally rolled out from abroad/above. This is one of the biggest difference between analysts in the US and India versus the Philippines. There is little investment in the analyst to grow. There is no encouragement to innovate they get bored pretty quickly which is why they are so susceptible to jump for a little more money.

Based on my observations, maybe 20% of this pool of thousands stick with the same company and rise up to be an experienced analyst in their original company. And you find the ones who stick are generally employed by US, Indian and European BPOs. They make about 25,000 and up PHP a month.

The final group, the more experience analysts are a rare breed. They have the skill similar to what you would expect from an Indian or US analysts with 5 years of experience. They have mastered a couple of disciplines (apps, systems, dbases, etc) and have carved out a good niche. They get paid at least 30-40,000 PHP a month and are firmly established with their employers.

They don’t hop for more money and they tend to be pretty loyal. The best way to pry them away is to offer them something new and different to play with. When you appeal to their curiosity, then they will consider hoping for more money. This is the play the HP, IBM, Google, Citibank, and others who have set up analytics teams are doing. They are trying to entice top talent with both money and new opportunity.

There is also a small, but growing number people in the Philippines who are at the level I was when I left Wells Fargo. Analytics Experts who can offer you a wide range of analytics solutions, understand how complex analytics works and are truly on the cutting edge. A lot of these analysts are now being classified as data scientists. The salaries for these positions can be 50,000 PHP or more a month.

Traditionally data scientist have advanced degrees in statistics, math or some other heavily technical field of study. They generally focus on building models and mining big data using advanced software. They have mastered several coding languages and use predictive and prescriptive modeling techniques. If I had to put a guess on this, there might be a couple thousand true data scientists in the Philippines right now. Hardly enough to go around.

In reality, many of the job postings across the Philippines for data scientists are actually looking for something different. The term is the current hot buzz word and many traditional analyst jobs are being mislabeled as data science jobs. It is very important when hiring someone who has data science in their background to make sure they really have the level of expertise you need.

Bottom line though, if you are looking for someone who is curious, adept at technology, loves solving problems and is data hungry, you can find them in the Philippines.

These thoughts are solely based on my observations and research; I would love to hear others either validate or counter any/all of my conclusions.

If you would like to know about the current state of analytics in the Philippines, please check out my new book, Putting Your Data to Work. The book serves as a guidebook for Filipino professionals to better understand how to get more data in their business. Connect with me and I’ll let you know how to get a copy.

Analytics in the Philippines – The Philippines is at the center of the action when it comes to solutions to the global need for analytics. Blessed with a solid foundation of young, educated and English speaking workforce, companies around the world are look for Filipino analytics talent to fill analytics positions. DMAIPH was set up to facilitate these solutions and bring the talent and the business together. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly so we can help you take advantage of this unique global opportunity.