The American Teleservices Association is proud to be a founding member and leader in a new contact center coalition called Jobs4America. The information below will assist you in determining your interest in joining us is this very important effort.
We are pulling together a broad based coalition of companies and organizations to highlight opportunities for retraining and expanding contact center job growth here in America.
Our goal is to set a job number target for new contact center jobs, in order to take advantage of the large pool of well-educated Americans now looking for work. Specifically the contact center industry, we are pulling together companies – including fortune 500 companies who use contact centers and the contact center operators (either using a physical contact center or a virtual contact center) – who can help make this transition happen.
We think this can help tell a positive story for the ATA, the industry and for the FCC chairman. We are looking to identify the companies who have goal to create a number of U.S. jobs they expect to create over the next year or two, bring them into a meeting with the FCC Chairman, announce the formation of the coalition in conjunction with the meeting, and launch a new website highlighting the effort at the same time.
With the unemployment rate hovering near nine percent and tens of thousands of well-qualified Americans looking for work, a group of forward-looking business leaders have launched a coordinated, strategic effort to help create jobs in America.
Members of our new coalition, Jobs4America, are making specific quantifiable commitments to create service jobs here in America. We invite additional business leaders to join us in this initiative to expand contact center jobs in America.
Contact centers can be a key source of employment opportunity for Americans looking for work. New technologies and a ready workforce have made it possible to create additional contact center jobs in the U.S. Businesses are harnessing broadband-enabled technologies to transform the way contact centers work, retraining workers, and increasing customer retention in the process.
If American businesses can harness the growing ubiquity of broadband, new technologies like VoIP and cloud computing to enable companies to create new jobs here in America, we will have advanced an entire service industry. We believe that the business community is strong enough to help hard-working Americans return to the workforce and revel in the pride of a regular paycheck.
Many states have enacted aggressive tax incentive packages in order to lure jobs to economically hard hit states. As a result, there may be new contact center opportunities, like in Michigan, that companies may not have contemplated before.
Disabled Americans are often employed in contact centers by U.S. Nonprofit organizations that assist companies and government agencies like the IRS in creating virtual contact centers that employ Americans with disabilities. By hiring highly qualified individuals with disabilities who work from home, organizations become eligible for a $2,400 Work Opportunity Tax Credit for every individual they hire.
Jobs4America has set an overall goal of creating a combined [80,000 to 100,000] U.S. jobs over the next two years. The coalition is challenging companies big and small to join in this campaign to create jobs in America.