Having a standardised educational curriculum can be the catalyst to Nigeria’s employability shortfall, which bridges youth unemployment and an educational system that develops skills-based manpower towards creating ready-made employees for the job of the future.
“If you go abroad you will find out that everything concerning education whether it is at the secondary school level or at the higher institution is standardized. That standardization is very key and we don’t have that here; so there is a need for the government to make a conscious effort to get all stakeholders involved, and until we have good governance, we are not going anywhere,” said Omomene Odike, Managing Director/CEO, U-Connect and Gr8jobsng, stating that Nigerian universities are working in silos at the moment, hence there is a need for a unified, codified process of transferring employability skills across the country.
Odike stated this at the second edition of the project employ career fair organised by Gr8jobsng tagged “Project Employ 2.0: Repositioning Our Youth for a Digital Tomorrow”. According to her, employability courses need to be entrenched into the secondary school curriculum.
At the moment there is no consistent pattern in government’s employability initiatives said Odike, who opined that such initiative’s impact must be measurable. “…most of the employability issues that we see are more political than geared towards us solving a problem,” she stated.
Speaking further on project employ 2.0, Odike stated that this year’s career fair focuses more on repositioning the youth for the digital space. “Understanding the trend in recruitment in Nigeria, we have noticed that there have been a shift from having people who have the certification and qualifications, to people who have the skills,” said Odike.
According to her, feedbacks from the last career fair indicated that a lot of the youth do not understand the idea of the digital space and the future of work on the global stage. This according to Gr8jobsng is a need to continually engage the youth on platforms that can prepare their mind ahead, with lots of training and discussion on the future of work.
Ubong King, the chairman of Ubong King Foundation said problems are the beginning of opportunities. According to him, anywhere there is a problem, there is an opportunity. “We have over 62.5 million youth that cannot be employed because they don’t have skills, and why they don’t why skills is that they are not trained for skills”.
King opined that the way forward is to reposition the educational sector to develop skills acquisition. Therefore, the government must get the right people involved, while the institutions help to find out the individual’s talent and how to groom it.
“Competition is not what we need right now, rather we need people who are thinking of solving problems. And to solve a problem you need to think of the knowledge base that you have; specific skills you have or tuned to acquiring,”
“There is too much focus on certification, instead of the problem. So, the key is to identify a problem and then leverage on the technology that can be best suited to solve the problem,” Alli said.
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