Chile focuses higher education on global sourcing

An article at Nearshore Americas discusses Chile's focus on higher education and how they're working to equip Chileans to compete in the global market.  Of interesting note is that only 4% of Chileans speak English at the professional level.

An excerpt:

CORFO (Chile's Economic Development Agency) has a national English language registry that counts 46,000 Chileans.  In 2011, some 8,050 of those registered sought out testing and 34 percent of them tested at an intermediate level.

“CORFO is still giving grants to study English.  It is a model that has been adopted by other countries in South America.  Really only about four percent of Chileans speak and write English at a professional level, that is why bilingual call centers have never been so popular here.  Those that have a high level of English are usually working in some other capacity like KPO or IT Services,” added Stojkovic.

You can read the full article at: Chile’s Short History of Reshaping Higher Education to Power Global Services