Orange has just announced 2,000 more jobs in the north east of England, the new call centre heartland.

Their critics call them sweatshops and bemoan the decline in manufacturing that has created an eager call centre workforce in the north of England.

The reality? Some sweatshops may exist, but call centres are as diverse as the industries that use them.

Mobile phone company Orange is to create 2,000 new jobs

Nurses operate NHS Direct, a 24-hour telephone advice centre for patients. At Styal prison in Cheshire, a commercial call centre has been set up, while British Airways has set up an on-campus call centre in Strathclyde.

Many more people across the UK will be joining them. About half a million people in the UK are expected to be working in call centres by 2002, around 2.3% of the working population.

Scotland alone is forecast to have 37,000 call centre workers by the end of the year. This compares with a total of 35,000 working in oil, gas and fishing, traditionally Scotland's key industries.

The boom has created a demand for training and UK colleges want to meet the need.

One of the first off the block is the City of Sunderland College (CSC), which got £450,000 of government funding to set up a specialist training facility.

About 6,500 call centre workers head to Doxford International Business Park in Sunderland each day, where One2One, London Electricity and others have call centres.

CSC has 64 training places on site. It offers three courses: preparation for call centre training, call centre technique and an NVQ 2 in Processing Information using Telecommunications.

Peter Bain, lecturer in Human Resource Management at Strathclyde University said: "You can't take anyone off the street and put them in a call centre. The person who mans the phone is the first point of contact the customer has."

Mr Bain says call centre staff often need more than just telephone skills.

Call centre jobs are stressful

"If you are working in directory enquiries, and take a call every 25 seconds, 140 times an hour, it is obviously very repetitive." By contrast, he points to IBM's European call centre at Greenock, west of Glasgow. "They offer 15 European languages... the prime requirement for the job is to be able to speak a language," Mr Bain said, adding that these calls can last an hour.

Call centre work is stressful, as they suffer more verbal abuse than most, finance union Unifi said. Some cannot hang up on any caller, however aggressive or abusive.

Textile blues

When textile giant Courtaulds cut 426 jobs, Sunderland's CSC retrained some of the sacked workers.

Anne Johnson, senior head of development for business at CSC, said: "When Courtaulds closed down, there were many women who were sewing machinists, there aren't many jobs in the textile industry any more. We had a special course for them."

While Courtaulds' case highlights how call centre employment is eclipsing traditional manufacturing jobs, it is not easy to provide a profile of the typical call centre worker.

Research by Strathclyde and Stirling University shows that around two-thirds of Scottish call centre staff are female and about one third are male. About two-thirds are part-time and one-third full-time. About 70% are under 35. Across the UK, salaries can range from £7,800 to £21,000.

US headstart

The growth of call centres stems from the popularity of Direct Line, for insurance, and First Direct, for banking, who copied the US, where telebanking started.

Finance union Unifi says cheaper technology paved the way.

A spokeswoman said: "The reason call centres have grown and will continue to do so is because telephone banking is cheaper than retail banking. The more they (the banks) can encourage customers to do by phone the better."

This raises the question of what the future holds for call centres. Will e-commerce wipe out the need for any human contact?

So far, it appears unlikely.

"It is okay for some of the simpler transactions, if you are talking about pensions, life insurance, they want face to face advice from someone they know," the Unifi spokeswoman said.

She points to a recent trial by Lloyds TSB of a staffless bank near Reading. "Customers revolted," she said.