A new report into the state of Glasgow’s contact centre sector has found that the city is well placed to cope with the expected growth of the industry over the course of the next three years.

Commissioned by Scottish Enterprise (SE) Glasgow and conducted by Experian, the main aim of the report was to investigate the current capacity of the city’s call and contact labour market.

There are over 110 contact centres in the Glasgow area employing 16-17,000 people and as the sector continues to grow SE Glasgow is working to ensure that the city has a competent and highly skilled workforce in place in order to meet demand.

The companies interviewed for the purpose of the report employ an estimated 5000 of Glasgow’s contact centre workforce and the majority expect to increase staff in the future citing expansion in business or product offerings as key reasons.

The report also identified the need for companies to do more to counteract the negative perceptions of the industry, and it commended the work of the Calling Scotland campaign which it said has played a pivotal role in doing just this since its launch earlier this year.

The overwhelming conclusion was that there is sufficient capacity within the local labour market to facilitate further growth, although the report did reveal that companies will need to adopt a wider range and more imaginative recruitment policies if they are to tap into Glasgow’s sizeable labour market.

Ron Culley, chief executive of SE Glasgow, said: "The contact centre sector is hugely important to Glasgow’s economy and with a number of companies expecting to increase staff numbers we have been working closely with employers to help identify and meet their recruitment requirements.

“In commissioning this report we hoped to allay any fears that the call and contact centre labour market in the city would be unable to cope with the anticipated growth in the sector. Not only did it allay these fears but it found them to be completely unfounded.

“What the report did find is that the contact centres stand to benefit from targeting the economically inactive within the wider Strathclyde region. Thirty-one per cent of this group, which equates to 200,000 people, would like to return to the workforce and this represents a sizeable untapped labour force.

“As the service sector comprises a major part of Glasgow’s economy many people, as a result, now have skills which are transferable to the contact centre industry. It is this flexibility and depth in our workforce that was a major factor in persuading businesses like 02 and Dell to locate here.

“The announcement earlier this year that between them the two companies would create over 2300 jobs was a tremendous boost for Glasgow and Dell alone has since received almost 4000 job applications.”

The results of the report were presented to an audience of MSPs who had been invited to attend a briefing of the contact centre sector on Monday 12 September 2005 at Abbey’s headquarters in Glasgow.

The report also challenged claims that employment in Scotland is threatened by offshoring of jobs to India and other territories.

Ron Culley said: “Although offshoring does pose a threat for some types of low value-added work, it is certainly a more limited threat than some would suggest especially given the problems being experienced by some firms who have moved activities offshore.”

The Taylor and Bain report, which will be published early next year, will support the findings from Experian. The authors, Dr Philip Taylor of the University of Stirling and Dr Peter Bain of the University of Strathclyde, found predictions that the industry would collapse in the face of offshoring, use of the internet and automation to be profoundly mistaken.

Taylor and Bain also found that the attraction in India in terms of lower costs has been offset by concerns over the country’s ability to handle more complex services.