‘DEVELOPING NIGERIA ECONOMY THROUGH CAREER ENHANCEMENT IN VERSITIES'

Macaulay Olumese Iyayi Jnr. is a  British trained technology professional. His 10 years stint as media and technology expert with the Frost & Sullivan, global growth consultancy firm engaged in selling research on new technologies to emerging market globally. In this interview, he speaks on how best to tackle career development among universities graduates and youths generally.  Excerpts:What actually is the focus of this partnership? We partner with the Lagos Business School, Lagos State University,

VERITAS University and Afe Babalola University. The primary purpose of partnering with Nigerian Universities is to provide technology tools and content in order to enhance the careers education of their students and connects them to career opportunities.

We will be delivering to our University partners, careers educational content, blogs and 10 minutes videos from leading HR experts, and partnering with companies who are seeking to hire Nigerian graduates both here and in the diaspora.

How will this partnership enhance Human Capital Development of Nigerian youths?

We believe that content is key and rich data will be a game-changer for Nigeria’s students and our University partners. For students to enhance their human capital development, 10 Minutes With delivers insightful career educational blogs written by recognised Nigerian Career bloggers, both across our platform and in partnering with Nigerian Social Media. We have a library of over 200+ 10 minute videos from leading global business men and women.

This includes Mitchell Elegbe, CEO of Interswitch and pan-African leadership institutes. This is a career educational content platform for students of our partner Universities. This platform will inspire students to pursue their passion.

This will also provide our partner Universities with a rich set of quantitative and qualitative data, technology tools and metrics, via our reports, to boost their knowledge of career prospects. For example, if 60% list their area of interest in venturing into Agriculture, the careers department or student counsellor can interpret that data to deliver to those students the further support required to pursue a career or set up a business in the Agriculture sector.

Nigeria’s students now have a one stop destination dedicated only to their career aspirations.

Will it have any positive  impact on the Nigerian economy?

We are a platform which is focused on delivering inspirational content and technology tools which aim to prevent skills mismatch and contribute to lowering graduate unemployment in Nigeria’s economy. I recognise that skills mismatch is not just a major problem in Nigeria, it applies to developed markets including the USA, where the top 50 companies alone spend over $600 million dollars on college recruiting, yet one out of every two recent graduates is unemployed or underemployed.

Nigeria itself has her own unique challenges, a fast growing youthful working population, of which 65% of this population is under 24 years old. The rate of unemployment within the age group of 20 to 24 years is 40 per cent. We hope that by being a direct link for our much maligned graduates the productivity of Nigeria improves. We can experience real sector growth in the SME sector, with over 17 million companies, there is huge potentials for employment generation and wealth creation in the Nigerian economy.

Our vision is to enhance the prospects of Nigeria’s graduates and contribute towards having a large, strong, diversified, sustainable and competitive economy in accordance with Nigeria’s 2020 vision and the Nigerian Industrial Revolution Plan (NIRP).

How does it help youths to build a formidable career?

If you are a student, you can use our technology tools and content to build a formidable career. Feedback from students is remarkably consistent. First, they don’t feel like they have enough information on the impact on their academic choices and employment prospects. And even when they acquire the right skills and credentials, they don’t have an effective way to display their capabilities. To build a formidable career in a market-place like Nigeria, where only 40,000 out of 400,000 are hired per annum, they need best support to help them to stand out in the crowd.

Apart from students, we need to bring Nigeria’s private sector and government closer together, to address the imbalance in skill acquisition.

Also, it requires world class technology that allows a generation of Nigerian graduates — who are light on work experience but maybe more heavy on life experience and academic achievements — to distinguish their talents.