Although Costa Rica is a great place for a US Company to utilize outsourcing efforts, there are still various challenges that companies should consider. Beyond mentioning the important language barriers, Costa Rica simply has a lot of competition in the Latin American outsourcing market. In 2011 AT Kearney conducted a survey that ranked Costa Rica 19th in the world in destinations of choice for outsourcing, behind Mexico, Chile, and Brazil within Latin America (Costa Rica Economy, 2013). Ultimately, US companies may find it more suitable to take their company’s outsourcing efforts to another country besides Costa Rica. Costa Rica is significantly behind some of its regional peers in terms of people skills and availability (Costa Rica Economy, 2013). Companies need to be sure that they look at other Latin American nations before moving their BPO’s to Costa Rica.
While Costa Rica in particular, is full of well-educated workers, having abolished its army more than 50 years ago and rechanneled the funds into education, including mandatory English training, it is important to note that those appealing factors can also be considered challenges (Fernandez-Stark, Bamber, & Gereffi, 2013). With education being high and human capital becoming low it creates high labor cost for entering companies looking to outsource. Salary demands in Costa Rica will continue to rise as more companies are demanding more human capital. Costa Rica also gives companies a hard time when it comes