Having the proper training and certification requirements helps call centers stand apart from the thousands of other organizations that are on the market. Such intensive training not only gives agents the skills they need to operate, but also the fuel they need for each and every customer interaction to be a successful one.

Recently, Canada’s Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa announced that he would cancel such call center training programs in the province because he believes that it will save money, but in fact it will actually make it harder when communities are competing for jobs.

 “Apprenticeship completion among the call centre trades is low and dropout rates are high,” said Sousa. “Only 10 per cent of workers who started the training programs completed them compared to an average of 50 per cent for all Ontario apprenticeship programs.”

In response to Sousa’s comment above, here what the CEO of the RCCSP  (Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals) Professional Education Alliance had to say in response to the lack of program design for the call center training sector:

Unfortunately, it's not unusual to see government funding for call center training go to waste in this way. It isn't the result of the trade, but the program design.

It takes a special type of personality to stick with and excel in a job that's 100 percent phone-based and involves dealing with frustrated and upset people nearly all day long - people that begin a conversation with low expectations of satisfaction. It is a special and hard-to-find personality, indeed, that's suited to such a profession.

Massive call center workforce training initiatives are structured very differently from corporate training programs or even outsourcing training programs. Without putting financial viability first, a program is very likely to fail. Instituting a rigorous customer service personality assessment phase prior to admitting well-meaning candidates into a training program is absolutely critical to managing the public funds.

Millions of dollars can be put to good use on qualified candidates or wasted on people that are unfit, personality-wise, for the job. Sometimes just letting people see what goes on inside a call center can help them to make a decision about a call center career, and that only takes a matter of minutes.

Any municipality, state, province or nation pondering mass workforce training and development to meet demands of a growing call center industry should recognize that thorough screening before one single training dollar is spent will be critical to the financial viability of the program.

RCCSP is a US certification and accreditation body to the call center industry, credentialing front-line professionals and call center supervisors, managers and directors. This organization has advised near-shore government economic development officials and universities in the design and implementation of mass workforce development training programs to support call center industry growth.

For those interested in such courses by RCCSP, the professional education alliance for the call center has developed a variety of training and certification programs, coming up in the next months, and will include the Call Center Manager Certification Training and Call Center Management Certification Boot Camp.