The tough operating environment that has affected many businesses’ profitability is making employers seek more generalists than specialists.
Generalists usually referred to as “jacks of all trade”, are people who have broad general knowledge and skills in several areas, while specialists have special knowledge and skills relating to a particular job or area of study.
Some human resource consultants and professionals told BusinessDay that the need for more generalists was logical as it is more cost-effective for a business to increase the remuneration of a current employee who has multiple skills that it can utilise than hire or retain more people with individual expertise.
“With the recent cutbacks, job losses, and the instability of the economy as a whole: the employment market is becoming more stringent yet strategic,” Jennifer Oyelade, director at Transquisite Consulting, a human resource and training consultancy, said.
She said businesses have been thrown back into the boardroom to restructure their operations, re-strategise their market presence/visibility, and build roadmaps that are fit for purpose across local and international markets.
“This means that for businesses to guarantee their business continuity, they will streamline their workforce and categorise them into the “necessities” and “dispensables”. The necessities are the professionals who have acquired cross-functional skills that complement each other without compromising their core expertise.”
According to Oyelade, a product manager can be a certified project manager with a certification in sales strategy and data science.
“This professional will understand how to conduct market research, design its segmentation, and use data science to manipulate those findings to develop multiple strategies to execute bespoke projects,” she added.
Ogugua Belonwu, founder and chief executive officer at MyJobMag, said there is a growing trend of generalists and that the demand for them usually boils down to the company’s size, adding that smaller companies looking to scale usually employ them.
“Employers are trying to minimise their costs by looking more for generalists than specialists.”
An article by InnovationManagement.se, one of the internet’s preeminent resources for innovation news and best practices, says a generalist can help see the bigger picture and come up with ideas and solutions that benefit the business as a whole.
“In a fast-changing workplace, transferable skills are becoming increasingly important and generalists tend to possess more transferable skills,” it said.
It said businesses are constantly taught about the importance of scalability. “But this isn’t just important for the organisation; it is also essential for its workforce, and transferable skills come in handy in many situations.”
Read also: Nigeria’s manufacturing investment hits 3-year low as economic woes worsen
Inflation rate in Nigeria has accelerated to a record high, largely on the back of federal government reforms, including the removal of petrol subsidy and naira devaluation.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that the headline inflation rose for the 17th straight time to 33.95 percent in May, up from 33.69 percent in the previous month.
Food prices, a major contributing factor to the surge in the inflation rate, grew to 40.66 percent from 40.53 percent.
Weak demand and intense price pressures affected business activity last month as it fell to the lowest in seven months, according to the latest Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI).
The PMI index fell to 50.1 in June from 52.1 in the previous month. Readings above 50.0 signal an improvement in business conditions, while those below show deterioration.
“There were signs of inflationary pressures picking up, with purchase prices, staff costs, and selling charges all increasing more quickly than in May. Although new orders continued to rise in June, the rate of expansion was only marginal and the weakest in the current seven-month period of growth,” the report said.
Rising inflation and sluggish growth in one of Africa’s biggest economies increased the number of poor people to 104 million in 2023 from 89.8 million at the start of the year, according to the World Bank.
Apart from poverty and inflation, Nigeria’s unemployment rate rose for the second time in the third quarter of last year since the NBS adopted a new methodology for the country’s labour force.
The survey said the unemployment rate rose to 5.0 percent from 4.2 percent in Q2. It stood at 4.1 percent in Q1, down from 5.3 percent in Q4 of 2022.
The share of employed persons in informal employment was 92.3 percent in Q3, a reduction of 0.4 percent when compared to 92.7 percent in the previous quarter.
Nigeria’s harsh business environment has also forced more multinationals to exit the country in the last ten months.
“Employers are looking for generalists to optimise cost so that they can survive. A lot of businesses are in a survival mood. The era of being a specialist is fast going. So, this is the time to be a jack of all trades,” Olamide Adeyeye, a Lagos-based human development researcher, said.
“It is beyond just being qualified for a job but the extra skill or value you bring on broad. For example, as a front desk officer, you should be able to do some administration work or manage some admin platforms. As a social media person, can you do graphic design,” he added.
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