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A graduate of the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, Meera Walia spent the first few years of her career as an army doctor, first in India & then in the Royal Army of Oman in Muscat. Then she decided she no longer wanted to treat patients. She moved, instead, to a newly developing sector called business process outsourcing (BPO), where she has remained for the past 12 years. The last three have been with WNS, where she is Senior General Manager, in charge of operations, research and analytics for the healthcare sector. "BPOs are great for work-life balance. You have the flexibility to work at any time of the day and at your own pace, which is something I value," she says. Based in Gurgaon, Walia leads 40 doctors, dentists, physiotherapists and pharmacists who are teamed up with 350 other experts, especially statisticians, to do work for WNS's healthcare clients. Healthcare has emerged as one of the fastest growing sectors for BPOs and companies like WNS are now recruiting doctors in numbers. "Our clients are doctors and they obviously like to interact with other doctors, not just at the sales level but also in operations. We expect to have over 1000 doctors within the next few years," says group CEO Keshav Murugesh. The first phase of the BPO wave put money into the pockets of a whole generation of 20-somethings willing to work odd hours at call centre jobs. That set is still going strong, but now BPOs are also attracting a different type — highly qualified professionals who want to sign up for the lifestyle the job offers. This includes a structured work environment, fixed hours and levels of stress that are far lower than that in the outside world. A chartered accountant by qualification, Pooja Daryani has been with WNS for seven years, which makes her quite a veteran by BPO standards. She gained experience in the equity research function at Ernst & Young and Goldman Sachs before she joined WNS, where she is now general manager for operations, research and analytics for the consulting and professional services sector in Gurgaon, leading a team of 100 other chartered accountants and MBAs. "A BPO job does provide better work-life balance than an investment bank. Our hiring ratio is currently 1:25, which means we have good employer branding," she says. Starting off as the captive BPO of British Airways and later bought over by private equity firm Warburg Pincus which took it public six years ago, WNS is an archetype in its field. It now employs over 25,000 people in ten countries, though a majority of its employees continue to be in India, spread across Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Nasik, Bangalore and Vizag. Today , as it moves from basic to higher end services, WNS is typical of the Indian BPO story. Though the bulk of its workforce works on prosaic tasks, there are also a rising number engaged in what is now called Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). "We don't want to be techno-coolies any longer," says Murugesh. "Earlier, our clients would tell us what to do and we would bill them on the basis of the number of people required to do their job. Today, we are partnering with clients, offering them the services of more qualified people, where billing is based on outcomes. Those who liked our plain vanilla offerings are now ready to buy into something more complex." Anupam Chatterjee graduated from Presidency College, Kolkata, in 2002, after which he started his MBA from HEC Paris and then transferred to MIT Sloan, where he specialized in analytics. Last year he returned to India and joined WNS as lead consultant - capability, in Bangalore. He believes much of analytics global corporate will increasingly outsource the job of analyzing big data to BPOs. "The shift to analytics based decision making is hard and structure of large corporate is such that they find it difficult to make the leap. We're doing some cutting edge work in multiple domains and we've been presenting a number of white papers in seminars," he says. Chatterjee leads a team of ten consultants specialized in analytics and has the job of recruiting more, which has become easier since WNS started getting advanced work in this field. "For this group of qualified professionals, job content is the biggest issue," says Chief People Officer R Swaminathan. "We actually don't recruit people who are over-qualified. There has to be a fit." A guided afternoon stroll down the WNS facilities in the Mumbai suburb of Vikhroli is revealing. Right at the entrance is a recruitment cell, where dozens of youngsters sit, and clutching resumes. But deeper inside, in a section dedicated to answering customer e-mails for a British utility company, everyone seems to be over 40, some over 50. What's the deal? "Most of them are former entrepreneurs," the section head says. "Their business failed, so they have come here." The profile of the BPO employee is obviously maturing over time, in more ways than one. Source - Economic Times
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