Here are five questions people ask most about the KPO (knowledge Process Outsourcing) industry:

1. What is KPO?

KPO is the second wave of outsourcing. First, you had the wave of BPO (Business process Outsourcing) companies, which handled outsourced business processes (the big three - customer service, accounting, back office) for foreign (80% American, 20% elsewhere) companies.

According to some estimates, the global KPO industry exceeded $17 billion way back in 2010. 70% of this business is sent to India. Yes, Indians are decent at English grammer. Did you know that more than 250,000 professionals work in various KPO-related companies in India?

2. How is KPO different from BPO?
KPO deals with all content-related work that foreign companies outsource.

Types of knowledge processes include
- copy editing (web content, e-learning content),
- converting existing books and publications to varied electronic formats (ebooks, pdfs, epub mobile ebooks, etc.),
- adding metadata to existing data (e.g. xbrl - adding metadata to financial reporting of companies for regulatory monitoring purposes; or, adding geographical data to digitized maps),
- summarizing and indexing medical and legal documents (in fact, these are a big part of KPO in India right now), and so on.

While majority of the KPO work being outsourced does not involve creativity by the service providers, some areas, like animation, may require teams to be creative.

3. What skills is the KPO industry looking for?
Or, How do I break in the KPO industry?
First, they look for your skills in the domain. For example, if you are in their legal process team, you must have a sound legal knowledge. But, even more importantly, you must be very good at written English (verbal also in cases where you have talk to clients or with team members in other countries - just remember to talk slowly, and say 'right' a lot of times). So, make sure your English grammar is good. Make sure you write correct, short, simple sentences. You don’t have to be creative most of the times. That is the client's job.

4. What countries do most KPO work?
At present, most of the big KPO service providers operate out of Philippines, Sri Lanka, Israel and India.

5. What are some of the big KPO companies in India?
Genpact, EXL Service, Evalueserve, Aptara (formerly Techbooks), Innodata (formerly Innodata-Isogen), Pangea3 are some of big-name KPO companies in India at this moment.

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